What is the Average Speed Conversion of VMware Converter?

[christopher_sib]

Hi Everyone,

I really need some help on getting the information about the average speed a VMware Converter can do, because with that information I will know what will be my recovery point and recovery time objective. Please give me clarifications when I have a 10G Ethernet or Fibre Channel Options.

Thanks guys.

[BenLoveday]

Hi there,

Hmm, I'm not sure if there is a hard and fast answer to this one...

It all depends on a number of factors, including the machine you are running Converter from. I would say that 10GbE would make quite a difference to the conversion times but in my experience the biggest bottleneck is disk IO. I'm assuming you are converting from physical tin to VM or VM to VM stored locally on disk or removable storage?

The conversion is also heavily dependent on the size of the VM's. Naturally, the more data to convert the longer the process.

Cheers,

Ben Loveday

[weinstein5]

I agree with Ben's assessment - also VMware COnverter would not be a solution for DR because even at its fastest with a small VM you are talking 20 minutes -

[jdptechnc]

That is something that you will have to measure for yourself within the confines of your environment.  It is going to depend on not only the maximum bandwidth you have available to your storage system, but also on the speed of the network connection to the source machine, the speed of the underlying VMware storage, the amount of contention present on the underlying VM storage at that time, how busy the vCenter server is, how busy the ESXi host is, whether you are converting a powered on machine or converting a backup image, and what you have to do to the machine after converting it to make it "production ready".  And other things I'm not thinking off off the top of my head.  There isn't a magic number that we can give you, unfortunately.