I'm trying to shrink the E drives of several Win2003 VM servers on the network so that they take up less space on the LUN (so a 200GB VMDK, would turn into a 70GB VMDK)
I'm using VMware Converter v4.01 (running on a VM) to copy/clone the VM across to a new location and mount the smaller VMDK back to the VM. The only problem is, that this process is unbelievably slow.
The copy is okay for the first 25%, but then the throughput drops down to nearly nothing (400KB/s). I've increased the spec of the migration VM, (2x CPU, 4 GB) but it hasn't made any difference.
I've ruled out the following:-
- Spec of the migration machine
- I've tried another migration VM, it still has the same issues
- Its not related to the time of day (I get the same results during morning/afternoon/night), so I can rule out backups etc
- Its not a slow Network. I can copy files using FastSCP with the migration VM at a very reasonable speed
- It takes exactly the same time to migrate if I prep the job direct to the ESX host as it does using virtualcenter
- It doesn't appear to be related to the resource pool, (I've changed to a larger pool) or problems with the ESX host (tried other hosts)
I would normally use another method to carry out this task (e.g. mount another VMDK and clone using ghost etc), but the project is not allowed to spend any money on software.
any ideas?
