Very slow migration

[curioso]

Hi,

I'm in the process of migrating my VM's from GSX Server 3.1 to ESX Server 3.0.2, but I noticed that it has a really very very slow performance. I tried to migrate one VM and for 16 hrs. it's only at 54% completed, so I cancelled it. Do you have any idea what causes this very slow performance. I'm using VMware Converter 3.x Enterprise Edition.

Your help is greatly appreciated

[bggb29]

what is the size of the vm being converted. We can do 20 to 30gb per hour on a conversion.

have you verified the speed and duplex of the network connection ?

are you copying from internal storage to a san

run esxtop on the esx box during the conversion what is the transfer rae showing for vwsf0

what is the hba showing for writes to the disk.

same for gsx what are you showing for data rates

[theanykey]

older machines mean slower bus, memory, disks, and cpu

if you are resizing the disk, be sure to defrag first - also if you are going to a window's partition to defrag that as well and make sure its got plenty of room

free up as much diskspace, memory and in some rare cases the registry size

make sure everything is fullduplex

also note the network plays a big part - especially with store-n-forward switches and VLANs

[Garfied]

Are you trying to resize disk in the convertion? In some case this operation seems to heavely slow down the process.

[w00ten]

20 to 30GB per hour on a conversion... Thank you for an awsome laugh. I don't think I have laughed that hard in years. My boss just came out of her office to see what was so funny. Now she is laughing too.

There is really no way to help speed up the process. Generally I just let it sit and pray to God that it doesn't fail at the end and have the entire scheduled downtime of a production server be wasted. If you sift through some of these forum pages, you will see that there are TONS of reports of extremely slow performance when converting to ESX. Noone seems to know the answer. I logged a support ticket with VMWare about it and was basically tossed to the side because they didn't want to deal with it. The "Converter 3.0.1 V2V poor performance" thread is one I have been involved in that has some insight from users, but we are yet to hear anything from VMWare in the thread. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[curioso]

It's 30GB.

I saw 100MBps and full duplex. I still have to check this because my NIC is a gig and my switchport as well.

They are all from SAN Disk

[curioso]

My GSX Server is just one year old and my ESX server is new.

I'm not resizing the disk.

[bggb29]

the 100 mb fu duplex is that what you are showing as connected as at the switch or the system.

A 100mb connection transferring a 30gb file should take about 1 to 1.5 hours.

Typically you see duplex mismatches causing intermittent performance, Make sure both the pswitch

and your system are at full and the max speed availble. Are you using auto for the negotiation or

did you manually force both sides.

[sbohnengel]

I tried to migrate one VM and for 16 hrs. it's only at 54% completed,

sounds like a nightmare.

That is way too slow, I assume that it is relevant to your target. NFS and SAMBA performance problems have been reported, that have an awfully slow network speed.

Install all the VMware Oktober Patches from the 8th of Oktober and try again, the patch you will need is ESX-1002089 that should mitigiate the issue.

It's worth a try ?:|

Stephan