I am having trouble trying to get my vm's off of a standalone ESXi 4.1 machine and onto a standalone ESXi 5.1 and am throwing in the towel after all of my various attempts and different trials.
Here are the specs of the machines :
Source
Dell 2900
Single Xeon Dual core HT @ 3Ghz
12GB RAM
Perc6i Raid
2x 500GB SAS 15k drives in Raid 1 for the VM store
2x120GB SAS in Raid 1 for the Host OS
2x 1Gbps connection into managed switch
Target
Dell R510
Dual Xeon Quad HT @2.4Ghz
24GB RAM
Perc H200
8x2TB SATA in Raid 10
1x 10GBps Fibre into managed switch.
Base sample VM that needs to be moved: 20GB vm , thick provisioned disk, no snapshots, Linux Guest.
Here is a matrix of my trials....
| Tried | Result |
|---|---|
| Using VConverter 5.1 standalone to move VMs | Intermittent failure after trrying to read the content from one mahcine to the other. Sometimes it kicks in and works, butstarts out with a reasonable time frame and then rolls out to a 2 day timeline to move a single VM, sometimes just dies. |
| Using Vconverter to export to disk as a VMWare Workstation VM | Same effect as previous. |
| Using Vsphere client to export to OVF from ESXi4.1 | Same effect as previous, except no timeline, just a stale progress bar |
| SSH into source host and try to use SCP to copy vm folder over to target. target is off and unregistered. | The smaller files tend to be transfered quickly, like a burst, but once the large vmdk is being read, the transfer rate slowly quiesces to about 3MBps and does not recover |
| Used FTPPUT from ESXi command line to move files over. | The smaller files move instantly. Transfer of the large vmdk starts at 40MBps (I was happy there for a second) and slowly spirals into the ground at 2MBps (party was over really fast). |
| Mounted SAN iSCSI endpoint storage into source for copying the files over. | Transfer carries steady at what appears to be about 3MBps, but eventually dies or loses connection and hangs (or is just moving so slow we can't humanly see it) |
| Configured second Gigabit connection to source and retried. | No difference. |
| WinSCP to copy vm folder from source to windows machine | No difference |
I have tried :
- bumping the frame rate across the board to 9000 on all endpoints
- doubling the output pipeline from the source
- begging and pleading the machine
- scouring the vmware community forums on everything I could ifnd that could relate.
- bumping up the dedicated resources to the host service (that made the "burst effect" last about 30 seconds longer)
Of note is that I am able to move a 1GB file in under a minute from the Linux VM istelf to any of the other machines on the network.
either:
- I'm really missing something
- ESXi has a throttle on the netowrk channel and/or buffering
- There is something fundamentally wrong with the ESXi 4.1 core
Frankly, I would like to believe that I am missing something. I've been racking my brain on this issue for a week now and exhausted all resources.
Anything else I can come up with is pretty much an iteration of any of the above items.
I would like to thank the community in advance for any consideration of assisting my plight as well as any support you may be in solving this problem.
Thanks!