ESXi Ovf exporting is slow. I have tested on ESXi 5.5, 6.0, 6.7 on multiple hosts and they are all pretty much the same. At first I thought it’s ovftool that is slow, but then someone remind me just do it directly in the web GUI -> Virtual Machines -> right click a VM -> Export, and I got the same speed.
The funny thing is if I start two export jobs at the same time, I got the speed doubled at around 350Mbps, which means the hardware is clearly able to handle faster exporting speed, but somehow it is throttled at a low speed per job.
I Googled it and I am not the only one experienced this issue. There are many others had reported this problem and no one got it solved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/2zi2t7/vmware_export_ovf_download_seems_to_have_a_capped/
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/ljejdc/ovftool_export_speed_limited_to_18mbps_how_can_i/
Another interesting thing is downloading vmdk from Datastore browser is fast and it can easily go fully speed at 1gbps. So I think maybe it is the compressing vmdk to ovf process limiting the speed.
So, to VMWare developers:
Please make exporting faster! It has to be done when the VM is shut down, so the speed matters! The slower the exporting, the longer the down time. Currently, no matter what CPU, NVME SSD, RAM you throw at ESXi, the speed is throttled at about 180Mbps and that’s not ideal nowadays.
