Transfer rate slow copying VM from ESX to local computer.

[Roman163]

Im busy whit a migration, so i want to download the VM's from an ESX 3.5 temporary to a local computer. But that's freaking slow. Downloadrate is between 150 and 250 kb/s. So 30 gig VM take about 2 days. We running 4 VM's whit a total of 160 gig. I used the VMware Infrastructure Client and WinSCP. Both are that freaking slow. Also tried FastSCP (becaouse is should be fast ) but thatone wil hang up whil connecting to the ESX.

The ESX server has 2 nic's. One for the Service Console at 100FD and one for the VM Network at 1000FD.

I did a read ans write test in the terminal.

Write is 0m0.901s

Read is 0m0.766s

What could be done to make the transfer faster? Connect a local USB disk to the server?

[philvirt]

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[Roman163]

It's locally on the ESX. At night it runs a little bit faster, up to 400kb/s. How can i dedicate more NICS? But wil it help? because a 100 mbit connection should be able to more than 150-400 kb/s. I would say 8 to 10 mb should be normal.

Also downloaded Filezilla and made a SFTP connection to the server. This was also low.

Than i tried the other way and used Putty to log on to the console. There i mounted a windows share into /mnt and copied a file into it. This is also slow.

[philvirt]

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[RParker]

Networks are NOT the problem. Network is JUST a means to transport something over cables. You could check the duplex setting of ALL the NICs to ensure that they are set to FULL (and autonegotiate the speed).

the problem is DISK. time and time again people complain their network is slow.. Noooo, it's the hardware / server. The disks are the most likely culprit on ANY file transfer, since they are the most impacted.

I would START with looking at the disk configuration and checking performance of the disks DURING the transfer of files, as evidenced by the fact that you said it's a little faster at other times, which means it CAN'T be the network, because they don't change, but disk performance DOES change.

[Roman163]

Disk configuration is fine. It is something whit the network configuration. And i think i now the problem. We are stil using MS terminal service to connect the thin clients to the server. And this makes a lot of broadcast traffic. This wil be replaced by Citrix in 2 month, so than should this problem be solved.

Now i found a solution. I just connect an USB harddisk to the server and copy the files onto that one. So a 580 Mb file does not need 50 min, just 1:48 min.