This is where I miss my setup with VMware Server. I do not have a iSCSI or NFS central storage. Before I started the move to ESXi, all my VMware Server (1.0.7) machines were Ubuntu 7.0.4 servers all of which had the directories where VMs were stored exported through NFS and cross mounted on each of the servers. So on each server I had the directory structure:
/vmfs/svm01
/vmfs/svm02
/vmfs/svm03
/vmfs/svm04
Where only one directory was local and the remaining three were NFS mounts from the three other servers. This made moving moving VMs around a breeze. I could even run vmware-vdiskmanager with input and output VMs being on different servers. The only thing that was slow was provisioning thick vmdks.
Now under ESXi moving VMs is a pain. Apparently scp in ESXi does not support the -C (compression) flag. Through scp, I can either scp thick vmdks from one ESXi to another or import them into thin vmdks and then scp them. Either way its a painfully slow process. And scp only gives a maximum thruput of about 2.5 MBytes/sec (20 Mbps) on my 1 GB connected NICs (VM nic is separate from management nic). All servers are either Dell (2850, 2950) or HP 2U (380 G4) servers, all with 4 or more U320 SCSI drives in a hardware RAID.
I was hoping in RCLI I would be able to run vmkfstools.pl script across machines but alas, it only runs vmkfstools operations on a single machine too.
Right now I am trying to move one of my VMs that has a 120 GB vmdk and it says its going to take 15 hours to move. I can reduce the server downtime significantly (I think) by taking a snapshot and moving that first, then downing the VM and moving the deltas but still all of this for doing something I could do fairly painlessly in VMware Server seems a lot of work.
My question is that does anyone have a better way of moving VMs from one ESXi to another? I will eventually have a centralized NFS store but that is not going to happen for another 2 months.
It would be very cool if there was a way to NFS export the local datastores in ESXi.
I wonder why there is no Add... entry in the top-menus.