Hi, I have read up the diff between exporting VMs (vCenter 5.5) OVA and OVF. I will need to use these to upload the VM to the cloud.
I am currently in the midst of converting a very large server (1.3TB) to really see the differences in terms of file(s) size and time taken.
- virtualized vCenter 5.5 with 4 vCPU and 16GB RAM, Synology NAS (RAID 5 SSDs) plugged into LAN with 1 shared folder presented to vCenter as mapped drive,
- The OVF took approx 14.5hrs and file is 239GB
- The OVA is still running, taken 8 hrs and vCenter shows 57% completed with a few large files already created.
Qn which I could not really find answers online
1. Would defrag of the Windows 2003/2008/2012 OS and Data disks help ?
2. Would shrinking the Windows 2003/2008/2012 OS and Data disks help ? (do note that I do not intend to change the VM status)
3. Where is the compression taking place as vCenter does not seem to use much RAM (in use 7GB) or CPU (almost 1% in use) ?
4. Are there any other ways to speed up the process ?