VMOTION slow

[PScrib]

I've setup my 3.5 ESX servers to use VMOTION as a test. Its currently using a 100mb ethernet port (I wont have gigabit - as recommended - for a couple of weeks yet). Because of this I was expecting VMOTION to be a bit slower than normal. The virtual machines are stored on a SAN fibre channel LUN thats shared between my three ESX servers.

I kicked off a VMOTION, from Virtual center, of a booted up XP box with a foot print of 6GB. It took over 4 hours to VMOTION over to the other ESX server 3! This obviously can't be right?

Can anyone give any tips on what to check for?

[oreeh]

Don't waste your time testing vMotion with 100 Mbit ethernet - use Gbit ethernet.

[VMKR9]

I have seen vmotion over 100mb and its not pretty, 4 hours is very long though, when I have seen it, it took about 8 minutes. Is there any other traffic on this link? change your vmnic properties to force the speed and duplex to 100 full and see if that helps?

[bitsorbytes · Accepted solution]

VMotion traffic is only copying the RAM that you assigned to the machine, NOT the disks. They are left on the shared storage.

The copy rates your saying even for the XP OS max of 4GB is too slow.

Check your duplex speeds, sounds like a mismatch. Hardcode port the switches and the ports.

Andrew

[PScrib]

UPDATE: I put in a dedicated gbit switch and assign a nic on each ESX server to it for VMOTION.

VMOTION now takes less than 3 minutes to complete.

Thanks guys.