How long should a convert take?

[SSacauskas]

I converted a physical server to VM - W2K Server with VMConverter running on PC - It took around 1 hour and 20 minutes

I tried the cold clone with the VMWare Converter boot CD. After around 4 hours at only 40 %, I stopped the process. Is this normal? I thought it should be faster.

Server is: C: 3 GB, F: 8 GB over a 100 Mbps network

[SSacauskas]

Anyone have any comparisons on how much time this takes on average? (obviously depending on disk space, network speed, etc.)

[asatoran]

I don't have anything concrete for you, but I recently converted a Win2k PIII/500MHz, 70GB RAID5. Running Converter from the machine, and destination is a network share, conversion took about 3 hours. (It probably would have taken less, but there was some other traffic on the LAN that I couldn't stop.) Running a conversion of the same machine, but from a Livestate image that was stored on my local HD, destination was a 2nd HD on my local machine, conversion still took a couple of hours. (Local machine: 3GHz XP-pro, 1.5GB RAM.) From what I'm told, anything between 5% & 90% is Converter copying the data so getting stuck there sounds more like LAN issues. Although I'm assuming your original hot clone was to the same destination so I don't know why it would have stalled on the cold clone.

[SSacauskas]

Well then mine sounds about right. I'm not sure what the problem is with the Cold Clone, but it shouldn't be much of an issue to hot clone. It's a web server so I'll just shut down IIS while I convert it.

I just wanted to make sure because someone told me that it should only take minutes and I pretty much knew that wouldn't be the case.

[theanykey]

Factors of speed can vary depending on the speed of both the source and the destination machine. The network. Duplex settings. And issues such as IRQ conflicts on the NICs.

Keep in mind older disks are slower. Also, if you resize the disk, you initiate a file-by-file copy which is of course slower - especially if the machine is fragmented.

A gigabit network will speed the process up considerably.

Be sure you are thinking of the network. A bad example would be installing converter on your local computer to convert a machine over a wan. In this case you would be better to install converter either directly on the machine or to a machine local to it's network via a remote session.

[Big_T]

Depending on your network environment, when booting the .iso for cold clone, you might need to go into the advanced NIC options and force the speed/duplex settings before kicking off a migration. NIC speed/duplex autodetection is problematic in my environment. This may or may not apply to your situation.