I am currently managing a vSphere 5 cluster of three ESXi hosts with a vCenter. We have an Essentials+ bundle license. It was originally installed with ESXi 4.1 and vCenter 4 and I have upgraded to vSphere 5 recently.
When we were still at 4.1, I migrated three physical production servers into our vSphere environment with the vCenter Converter (the integrated one). All those three migrations were very slow, only an average of about 10 MB/sec. But they were all done on weekends where everything was just idle. We have a Gigabit Ethernet network (of course), the servers are not brand new, but given our workloads they have plenty of power and memory (2x Xeon 5160 and 32 GB each). Storage is an IBM DS3400 with 15k SAS disks and all 4 GBit FC HBAs (QLE2462). After the migration, performance is very good in all aspects (CPU, memory, disk I/O). So why were those P2V migrations so slow?
I had one physical server still running waiting to be migrated to vSphere with version 5 (since it has a 3 TB SAN LUN to be migrated as a phys. RDM). I had also hoped for vSphere 5 to offer a faster P2V migration.
Right now I am running that P2V conversion with the standalone converter 5.0 and while it is a rather only physical source machine (IBM x336) it should not be THAT slow. It runs at only 4.5 MB/sec and given its 110 GB data to be migrated this will take over 7 hours. The machine has its source volumes both on local disks and on a SAN LUN (on the same DS3400 but a different array). The disk throughput on the source machine is quite good and it has two Xeon 3 GHz CPUs.
Does anyone have an idea why the P2V conversion is that slow? And what I could do to improve that?
Kai-Uwe
