Exporting a VM of about 38GB takes over 12 hours...WHY?!

[thondeboer]

I have a VM of about 38GB and trying to export it from vSphere onto my local drive and the export takes over 12 hours!

Why does it take soooo long? It's compressing the disk into an OVF of about 19 GB but surely the compressing should not take THAT long?

Any ideas?

Thon

[Anjani_Kumar]

I must ask you to check below things.

1, Storage : what is the storage you are using. (FC or iscsi)

2.Network: what is the network speed of your physical host .

3. Check out if your local computer having a good speed nic or not.

4. Also check if the same vm is not sharing others servers disk which are not on the base location.

5. What is the Geo location of your host and the local machine.

6. Also check if no any media is mounted on it.

[thondeboer]

Thanks for the quick reply.

1/2) I am storing the OVF on a NAS system that is local to me, although only on a 1GB NIC

3) just copying 19 GB takes about an hour or so...not 12

4) All disk are local to the client

5) They are in the same physical location (server closet)

6) No media is mounted

So the only think I can think of is the number 1/2...I'll try to store it local to my machine

[Anjani_Kumar]

Both the important resource Storage/Network is the reason for slow transfer. thats why its taking so much time.

if you want to cross check just try to transfer a smaller vm from host to your local machine.

That will be more clarifying.

[thondeboer]

Maybe, but 12 hours....

Doing a transfer now from the host to my local machine...Still as slow as heck...

We'll look into using the local storage for the VM's...The VM's are also running on the isilon system as datastore..

Thon

[thondeboer]

Also...how fast SHOULD it be going? A VM of 40GB on disk that compressed to 20GB...What should I get?

Thon

[tigcne]

You should consider all transfer rate involved:

1) storage speed (server side and client side), are they the same speed? 

2) if across network, both cards have same speed? routers or switch too?

3) you're using vmclient? webclient?

4) formart your vm hds witch formart they are? thin? lazy zeroed. (this importante, because your reservation size will be considered.

I have averange 60~80Mbps over network, server side (array in raid 5 10k rpm 4 discs , nic card 1gbps) , client side (core i5, 1gbps, ssd 120gb), this sizes of backup I take less than 1 hour to finish.

[arshad21dvmw]

does the VM have snapshots, delete all snapshots if possible 

[dgogate07]

Is there any default built-in limit in ESXi host when it comes to OVF export?
I have seen similar issue, when I export any VM, irrespective of size in GB or TB, it gets exported very slowly at an average speed of about 45Mbps, my ESXi hosts have 1GB NIC's. and FC Datastores, as far as storage is concerned, there are no issues at storage level as I see wait time of hardly few milliseconds when it comes to IOPs, not even double digit.
But when I browse the datastore and select the VMDK of the same VM and download it, it gets downloaded superfast as if I am copying a file locally from 1 drive to another.