restoring a virtual machine made in VCB with VMware Converter over the WAN

[RUG201110141]

I have a remote ESX 3.0.2 farm. I'm using VMware Consolidated Backup to backup the machines and have no issues with that. I'm having an issue restoring though. We have a license for VMware Converter Enterprise Edition from which to can use to restore VCB backups. The machine VMware Converter is installed on is in one location where I have a majority of my virtual machines. The restoral process of a VCB backup works great locally. When I try to restore a VCB backup of my remote ESX farm it is very slow. How does VMware Converter work. Does it copy the VCB backup bits over the network to the VMware Converter machine and then out to the remote ESX server farm. I have the VCB backup files in the remote location. They are stored on a machine with a 1GB link and it's on the same subnet as the remote ESX servers. I'm concerned that somehow VMware Converter is taking the files and pulling them from the remote location to Converter and then copying them back to the remote ESX servers.

[dconvery]

It sounds like that is exactly what is happening. Did you try installing Converter on the machine that is the VCB proxy so that all communications are local to the esx cluster?

[RUG201110141]

I already verified that the restoral procedure works well from the remote VCB machine to the remote ESX server that are located in the same location. What I wanted was a centralized location for performing actions like the restoration of a VCB backup and a centralized location for the installation of VMware Converter. It just makes things a little easier to maintain and document that way. The restoral procedure from the remote VCB machine to the remote ESX server takes 5 minutes and the restoral procedure over the WAN took 12 hours.

That kind of sucks You think there would be more intelligence built into this application. We have Platespin PowerConvert for doing P2V's and it doesn't have the P2V's traverse the WAN, but obviously something is going on with VCB to make it agonizingly slow.

[dconvery]

SUX man. You will probably be better off having a VCB/converter server at each location.