I have an all-in-the-box personal lab on a 16-core processor 128GB RAM server running ESXi 6.0 Update 1. I use nested virtualization and although the performance is a little less, it's not too bad to create VMs and play with them. All my nested VMs are on a separate vSphere Standard Switch with no physical uplinks. Promiscuous mode, MAC Address Changes and Forged Transmits are all set to Accept on the switch and the portgroup. For storage, I have multiple Western Digital SATA2 7200rpm 64MB Cache HDDs. On my Nested ESXi 6.0 hosts, I share eager-thick VMDKs using the multi-writer parameter and Independent-Persistent mode. I have used the VMware Paravirtual, LSI Logic Parallel and sometimes LSI Logic SAS controllers to see which would give better performance in my testing. The problem I have is that snapshots and vMotion of VMs on those nested ESXi hosts are very very slow. The tasks do complete but not within 20 minutes. I've also seen that deploying VMs from template takes 3minutes for a thin version of Windows 2008 R2 (~7GB) and about a minute to customize it. Is there anyway I can get these to go fast. My main concern are the snapshots and vMotions. The hardware I use may be the bottleneck and I have thought about getting a 1 or 2TB Samsung EVO 850 SSD. I need some suggestions before I make that kind of investment.
If this question has already been answered elsewhere please direct me.
