How to Speed Up File Transfers To/From ESXi Datastores

[Shump]

Hi folks!

Our company has a large number of

VMware ESXi 3.5 and 4.0 servers. (Note: This is the free ESXi, not the

paid ESX Server.) They generally work very well for us. The one area of

problem I have is in transferring files to and from the datastores on

the machines.

Since we do not have the paid ESX Server, I cannot

use VirtualCenter or vMotion to transfer virtual machines from one place

to another. So if I need to move a virtual machine to a different host,

the only solution I'm left with is to download the virtual machine

files from the data store onto a local or network drive, and then upload

them to the new datastore, all using the vSphere Client. The problem

with this is that I have found it to be extremely slow. It can take

hours just to copy one virtual machine.

Does anyone know of a

better way to do this that would decrease the transfer time?

Thanks!

-

Tom

[kumarsenthild · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Use veeam fastscp 3.0 its freeware. you can connect n number of esxi server.

you can move/copy directly from one server to another server....

Regards

Senthil Kumar D

[lamw]

You can use Veeam as mentioned, but there's a few hacks you can also use:

http://vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/http_transfers.php

http://vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_FTP.php

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Community

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi,

You can also use VMWare Converter Standalone 4.0, it's a free software and pretty powerful one. I use the same to transfer VMs across our 5 ESXi servers and have found out to be faster than normal uploading of files. You can also do many more tasks using the VMWare converter standalone. Here is the site to download the software from: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/4_0

Hope this will help you

Regards,

Nikhil

[PaulSvirin]

Nice words from one of the bloggers:

"

Keep in mind though that FastSCP is faster than WinSCP because FastSCP

doesn’t encrypt the data that is being copied. WinSCP does encrypt the

data and I consider WinSCP to be more secure than FastSCP. FastSCP does

use an SSH control channel though. An SSH control channel can best be

described as a secure channel which is used to pass user/password/port

information. In addition to the ports used for SSH other ports need to

be opened up for FastSCP to work, which increases the attack surface of

the ESX host. Some of you might have security policies in place, this

might be the time to start reading it.

"

Thus, you shouldtake into account the security policies from your organization nd make the right choice.

---

iSCSI SAN software

http://www.starwindsoftware.com

[AntonVZhbankov]

The only way to dramatically increase transfer speed - to use external shared storage.

In this case you just power VM off, unregister it on host, register on another and power on.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Shump]

Thanks to everyone for your quick replies! The Veeam FastSCP solution worked perfectly for us! Since all of this work is being done on our internal network, behind a firewall, with none of the relevant ports exposed to the Internet, the security issue was not a concern for us.

I have also found the VMware Converter standalone to be useful as well, but FastSCP is really the type of solution I was looking for in this particular case.

Thanks again,

Shump