Converter Enterprise Traffic Flow

[RobbL]

Can anyone explain the traffic flow when performing a P to V using Converter? I want to make sure that I understand this so that we can plan for and minimize the amount of WAN traffic.

Say, in an extreme example, all four components (VI Client, VC Server, ESX Server, Source Server) are all in different sites connected by a WAN link. Which WAN link(s) would carry the brunt of the conversion traffic? I assume that the VI Client and VC sets up the conversion, but the actual bulk of the traffic will go directly from the source server to the ESX server. Is this correct? I would hate to find out that traffic actually passes through VC or even the VI client first before going to ESX.

Thanks!

[BenConrad]

When doing a P2V you will:

1) Contact the virtualcenter server which in turn gives you information about your infrastructure and resources on the ESX hosts.

2) When you start the P2V you will need a direct connection to TCP/902 on the ESX server, Converter will send data from the source pHost directly to the ESX server. This is where 99%+ of the WAN traffic will be.

Ben

[RobbL]

So was my original assumption correct? When you say "converter will send the data from the source physical host" do you mean that converter sends an instruction to the agent on the source host to send directly to ESX? Again, I just want to make sure that if you're running converter on your VC machine, it's not pulling in the data and THEN handing it off to the ESX server to be stored.

[BenConrad]

Ah, I missed that you are running Enterprise and that you can remotely connect to other servers. We usually install the agent on the P2V candidate and go from there. I'm not sure about this situation, try testing this and looking at Windows Perfmon network counters.

Ben

[kjb007 · Accepted solution]

The bulk of the traffic will be going from the source directly to the destination. There will be some updates from the vc server, so connectivity has to be there, but the bulk is still from source to destination as BenConrad stated.

-KjB