Slow Vm cloning and deploy with fc san lun to lun

[christg]

Hi, there my problem

Vcenter 4.1 on Vm 2vcup and 4gb ram

Production cluster

3 ESX 4.0 update 1 host , dual xeon 5550 with 196 gb of ram

running 126 total vm

Host using 40% copu and 75% memory

connected to san using 2 fc hba per host

1 standalone test esx host 4.0 update 1 running no vm

dual xeon 5550 with 8 gb of ram.

connected to san using single fc hba

San it a netapp

using 10 lun on same raid array

8 datastore running production vm

VMSAN01SFS

VMSAN02SFS

VMSAN03SFS

VMSAN04SFS

VMSAN05SFS

VMSAN06SFS

VMSAN07SFS

VMSAN08SFS

2 datastore for test purpose

TESTDATASTORE1

TESTDATASTORE2

Template using

Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on VMSAN08SFS datastore

16 gb space

Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on TESTDATASTORE1 datastore

16 gb space

Scenario #1

Test esx host is removed from vcenter

I deploy Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on VMSAN08SFS to datastore VMSAN01SFS , take 51 min

I deploy Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on VMSAN08SFS to datastore VMSAN04SFS , take 52 min

I deploy Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on VMSAN08SFS to datastore VMSAN06SFS , take 50 min

Scenario #2

Test esx host connected to vcenter, test datastore zoned only to test esx host

I deploy Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on TESTDATASTORE1 to datastore TESTDATASTORE2 , take 15 min

Scenario #3

test esx host removed from the vcenter, test datastore zoned only to production cluster host

I deploy Windows 2008 r2 standard vm on TESTDATASTORE1 to datastore TESTDATASTORE2 , take 53 min

Conclusion

using the same lun and san.

Vm deployment and cloning is very slow using the production cluster host

Vm deployment and cloning is fast using the test esx host.

Production esx host have workload that affect the vm deployment and cloning performance

since my host are only utilizing 40% cpu and 75 % memory then my hba are producing only 20-30 mb  disk utilization

we are looking for a setting that can free enough resources to speed up our vm deploy.

[christg]

Problem solved by upgrading to esxi 4.1