Very slow VM Relocating

[MKajic]

We have Vmware vSphere 4 (Advanced Edition).

Because of lack of space on one of ours SAN Storage we've moved one of our virtual machines to another SAN Storage (different Storage - different LUN).

VM is a large 830 GB.

After 20 hours we're on 88% (Relocating virtual machine). After 80% (8 hours before) it takes about one hour for one percent.

On SAN Switch (4Gbit Brocade) load is minimal.

Source storage is 6 SAS Disks with RAID5.

Destination storage is 11 SAS disks with RAID6.

We think that our storage could not be bottleneck.

Server is FUJITSU SIEMENS Model: PRIMERGY RX600 S4,

We found on forum that others had same problems (on ESX3).

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/49154?start=0&tstart=0

But we still think that it could not be normal!

[AndreTheGiant]

The VM has some snapshots?

Andre

[MKajic]

Yes, VM has snapshots.. Well, it had snapshot and it took all free space on LUN. We deleted them with snapshot manager, but that did not help, we did not get any free space (all vmdk files are still with VM..). Because of completely full LUN we were unable to start VM and so we decided to move it to bigger location. And here we are with the problem.

[AndreTheGiant]

You can use VMware Converter or vmkfstool to "consolide" the snapshots.

Andre

[kwizi66]

Add an extent. This should give you the space required to start the VM's, consolidate snapshots or move them.

As Andre said, you can remove the snapshots by using the vmkfstools -i command.

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/DATASTORE/VM/OLD_DISK_FILE.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/DATASTORE/VM/New_DISK_FILE.vmdk

Then link the VM to the new disk files.

Might want to add an alarm to notifiy you when you've got a ton of snapshots. I would move all the VM's off the datastore, delete it and recreate it because I don't like having to keep track of extents.

[patters98]

I had quite slow Storage vMotions recently of some SQL servers that were thin provisioned. I gather that they can get fragmented. VMware claims in a white paper that this isn't appreciable but my experiences seemed to differ. I've now set all my VMs back to thick provisioned. When I Storage vMotion them now they're much faster. Is this a factor here too perhaps?