Another Performance issue ...

[AndersJuulJense]

Hi all

first of all i'd like to say im quite new to VmWare but learning fast 🙂

But also im abit overwhelmed with the amount of information thats availeble and having quite a hard time seperating the "need to know" from the "nice to know" ... So in light of this im gonna ask a few questions thats probably been asked and answered a few times before.

I do hope you will have abit of patience with me and hopefully can help me out abit.

First our enviroment:

small company with approx 30 users (we are printer specialists Xerox so ask me about printer issues :smileygrin:)

We have a traditional old-school setup and just recently started looking at VmWare.

Our running enviroment consists of:

1 main server (HPGL350G5) running SBS2003

1 secondary server (HPGL150G5) Running Std2003 (WTS)

1 third VERY old DELL server running Superoffice 6 (this i PLAN to virtualize)

1 shuttle running Std 2003 XPDTEST (Converted this physical machine to ESXi)

1 laptop running Vmware server 2.0 containing 2 x WinXP (Converted the one Winxp to ESXi, the other are awaiting me getting time)

For this purpose i bought a used Dell Poweredge 2950 server
it has 2 x 73GB discs in Mirror Raid, 4 GB ram and 1 Xeon CPU 2.3Ghz

as a Datastore on the ESXi 4.1 im using an old "Buffalo Terrastation TS-HTGL/R5" with 4 x 250GB std discs in RAID 5.

All servers, Terrastation and DELL server are connected through a 1GB network. If I move a file manually from "NAS" to a "physical" server i read 30MB/sec but only write with 9MB/sec. (this is probably performance issue in the NAS).

Now im aware this setup are FAR from a good setup and can be configured vastly better ... but I hope you can "look" through this for now.

So far i've got 2 Vm's up and running on the "Dell/terrastation" combo. Performance are "wanting" but still accepteble

What I'd like to know is this:

When I run "VmWare standalone converter" and want to build a VMguest from a Physical host why is it, that it takes 26 hours?

When I look on the Datastorage the size of the VMGuest it's 12GB and "Provisioned data storage" are 25GB.

If I calculate this i get a "conversion rate" of 0,13 MB/sec ...  !!!

can this really be right?  is this slow transferral really caused by the NAS or is this some issue in the VmWare?

[Josh26]

Hi,

The easiest advice I would give is that VMware converter doesn't cover white space in its time estimates.

For example, I had a server with 150GB of data, on a 450GB disk. Two hours into the conversion, it has copied 149GB of data, and it estimated another four hours to go. Two minutes later it was finished. This may help you get more accurate about the time estimate.

These questions may help us identify an issue.

What type and speed of disks are in the Terastation? SAS or SATA?

Are you accessing this Terastation using iSCSI or NFS (as I'm not familiar with the model, this may be a dumb question).

Is the NAS being accessed over the same physical network as your data? What type of switches are involved?

[AndersJuulJense]

Hi Josh

thanks for taking your time and comments 🙂

I can say that I have a "start time 11-03-2012 12:14" and "Endtime 12-03-2012 16:16". This is for a converted Windows XP onto the ESXi so this is not a estimate as the transferral are underway but after the completion. The summary in "VmWare Vcenter Converter Standalone" also says "Average Transfer Rate of 121KB/Sec.

This IS from a laptop on 1 switch (Dell 24port, managed) in office enviroment to another Switch Linksys 24p at Servers. Both switches, Nas, laptop (running the xp) and server are all on 1Gb NIC's also. If I copy a file manually from this laptop to the "NAS" i get a write speed on about 10MB/sec.

The NAS discs are most likely SATA

The Datastorage connection are NFS to the NAS

I have another Winxp being converted into ESXi as we speak and its on 50% and so far been running since 12-03-2012 19:57 (and as I write the time is 13-03-2012 08:21 and this copy are pointing on the LOCAL SERVER datastorage (2 x 73GB SAS 15k Discs in RAID 1)

So far i DO have a higher "Average transfer rate" of 375KB/sec which is an improvement ... but this could be degraded ALOT over the remaining 50%