Over the weekend, I was trying to export a virtual machine from vSphere using ovftool command line. To my surprise, it was extremely slow. In fact, I wasn’t patient enough to wait for its finish and “Contrl+C” it. Initially I was thinking it could be ovftool issue, so I tried exporting from vSphere Client directly. Still very slow and I had to cancel it as it would run for a few hours according to the progress dialog box.
Feb 20, 2013 - When you go to create new virtual machines in vSphere (or any. This brings up the Clone to Template Wizard and walks you through the.
To root cause the problem, I tried:
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Restart the vCenter vpxd service
Reboot vCenter server
Connect vSphere Client directly to the ESXi server
Reboot ESXi
Nothing changed – still extremely slow.
I had similar virtual machine exported consistently within 10 minutes before. The virtual machine is configured with two disks, one of which is pretty small and the other is 1TB. Both virtual disks are thin provisioned. When successfully exported as before, the OVA file size should be 800MB or less.
As I posted a question on the vExpert forum, I got helps from Steve Kaplan who thought it’s a VM related issue. It reminded me to go on another test: deploy the previously exported OVA to a VM, and export it again to OVA. The magic happened – the export was done in 10 minutes.
Now, what is the difference of the my current VM and the newly deployed? After comparing the datastore folders of both VMs, I found that my current VM has a snapshot and the newly deployed does not. It then started to make sense: when a virtual disk has a snapshot, it will have to first combine the original disk and snapshot delta disk into current one. Regardless the thin provisioned format, the combination process may have been done as if it were normal disk. In my case, the exporting of the VM is like exporting a thick provisioned 1TB VM.
So I decided to consolidate the virtual disks and see whether it could make any difference. Luckily, it worked.
The key takeaway from reading this post is:
MAKE SURE NO SNAPSHOT when exporting a VM regardless it’s thin provisioned.
I've experienced this issue first-hand, where the free VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 is much slower than earlier Converter releases, during the cloning of physical to virtual disk phase.
I canceled the slow job pictured below* and performed the recommended fix, restarted the already configured conversion job, and immediately saw dramatically reduced estimated times to completion, about 3x faster for my particular situation.
The fix involves editing one xml file on the physical machine being converted, to avoid SSL related slowdown, takes about a minute to do, well worth it for the many hours of conversion time it saves. Here's the fix!
*Just a reminder, this is the free version of VMware Converter that you can install on a running Windows based machine (Windows XP/7, Windows 2003/2008, etc), no reboot required. You then step through the simple wizard, and convert that same physical machine into an ESX/ESXi hosted virtual machine (P2V), automagically. Works very well for a vast majority of systems. Admittedly, dynamic volumes or drive extender can be problematic, the screenshot below was sped-up, but later failed at roughly 47%, due to drive extender related issues. That's OK, converter never claimed to handle those situations anyway, was just giving it a shot, and grabbing some screenshots. I'm working on alternative methods for tricker physical machines (sector-by-sector copy and/or RDM mappings, etc.)...stay tuned!
Dec 26 2011 Update: Yes, I can handle migrating Windows Home Server with its Drive Extender, using a combination of RDM mappings and VMware Converter: TinkerTry.com/rdm4sata
Mar. 05, 2013 Update: New article spotted, with a potentially helpful scripted way for you to handle disabling SSL, check it out: Automatically Disable SSL – VMware Converter, Posted by Brian Graf, on February 27, 2013, here's an excerpt:
After doing WAY too many conversions with converter I decided I was sick and tired of turning off the SSL encryption manually, closing the open files and folders, and restarting the VMware converter worker service.