VMWare VSphere 6.5 performance issues (vMotion, Veeam, general UI)

[PaulFleetwood]

I am testing a new installation of 6.5 (currently on trial licenses, pending our new licenses being approved for purchase). I'm running two new HP G9 servers (fairly high spec).

I have ESXi 6.5 installed on both, and the 6.5 VSphere Appliance deployed.

I have a test VM on there, and I am testing VMotion. Initially it failed as VMotion port had not been configured, so I added this to the VMManagement network port (2 x 1Gb NICs in failover).

VMotion now works, but is incredibly slow (15-20 minutes to move the guest between hosts - host migration only, not storage VM). Up to 40% is quick, then it crawls from 40% to about 70%, then the last bit is quick.

I've tested snapshots, and they seem to run through quickly, so I don't think that part of the process is a problem.

We tested Veeam backups yesterday, and they were also very slow (approx. 1/10 of the speed we see on our production system)

I've tried a full shutdown and restart of the hosts, and checked all ports are configured for 1Gb

Does anyone else have any suggestions on what to look at?

Does the fact it is slow between 40% and 70% highlight anything specific?

Also, I'm finding the web interfaces incredibly slow. The web interface to the hosts often times out during processes. The HTML5 interface for VSphere is slightly better, but still very sluggish.

Is that 'normal' or could that be another symptom of my performance issues?

Any thoughts / suggestions would be appreciated...

Thanks

[DavoudTeimouri]

Did you install ESXi from HPE customized image or VMware image?

[PaulFleetwood]

I downloaded the 6.5 ISO from VMWare site and burnt to a USB key to install...

Is there a better way to install VMWare?

[DavoudTeimouri]

Download HPE ESXi image from this link: HPE and VMware’s infrastructure as a service solution | Hewlett Packard Enterprise

[PaulFleetwood · Accepted solution]

Thanks Davoud

I've been reading through those articles - I wasn't aware of those.

Looking at some other articles I found overnight, I first tried some easier troubleshooting options (before looking for a full reinstall).

Two of us checked the servers yesterday and all NIC configurations were definitely running at 1Gb.

This morning we went through a process of shutting down the ports (on the switch) and then re-connecting to force a re-negotiation.

We then found a couple of ports that seem to be struggling to stay on 1Gb, and sometimes ran down to 100Mb (one of which was the vMotion port).

We've traced this down to faulty cabling, and now have vMotion running at a sensible speed.

I may still look at options to rebuild the hosts using the HP image to see if that improves the speed of the UI. I need to look to see if it's possible to export the host config before I do this (to avoid having to manually reconfigure the hosts again after a reload).

Thanks again for your help.