I have been reading thread all over the Internet for two days and every discussion of this gets into the weeds and goes nowhere... and usually ends with "use Veeam", which doesn't seem to really work any better when I tried it.
Please, before you respond, read the who post and let it sit for a moment or two. As I said... I've found dozens of posts about the same thing and they all take the same path... which looks like a bunch of overly smart guys not thinking through the question, just reponding to up their post counts. I'd like this to be a meaningful thread that finds answers for me... and all those who've asked before and ended up with nothing.
Background
I am migrating a small environment from ESXi 4.0 & 4.1 to new hardware running ESXi 5.1. I bought the VMWare Essentials package so I could utilize the full 48GB in the new hardware... assuming it would also fix my upload speed issue... but it did not (I could see a free product being throttled, but keeping that throttle once licensed is unethical).
Issue
Uploads of large VM disk files downloaded from the old 4.1 environment to the new 5.1 environment are stupidly slow. I have done the following to narrow this down to "it must be VMWare 5.1 throttling these uploads, even though it is now licensed". But that seems crazy, immoral, and agaisnt the law (or it should be).
So I'm asking the community to avoid the off-the cuff answers and dig in on this one, because from what I see, this impacts a bunch of people and no one seems to have a valid answer. For me, I have a couple hundred GB to migrate and don't want to take 3 months of weekends to get it done when I should be able to do it in a couple of weekends.
Findings
1: File copy from a VM on ESXi 4.1 to a VM on ESXi 5.1 screams (maxes out 1 GB NIC)
2: File copy from a VM on ESXi 5.1 to a VM on ESXi 4.1 screams (maxes out 1 GB NIC)
3: Download a file from datastore on ESXi 4.1 to local workstation on same network screams (maxes out 1 GB NIC)
4: Upload a file from local workstation to datastore on ESXi 4.1 on same network screams (maxes out 1 GB NIC)
5: Download a file from datastore on ESXi 5.1 to local workstation on same network screams (maxes out 1 GB NIC)
6: Upload a file from local workstation to datastore on ESXi 5.1 on same network BLOWS CHUNKS the size of Texas (uses only 6-8% of 1 GB NIC)
So for items 1 - 5 to work exceptionally well... my disks are working fine, my drivers are working fine, my config must be fine also... on both platforms. It has to be something in 5.1 is throttling uploads... even when licensed. Veeam doesn't help.
What says the community???
Thanks Everyone!!
Mike
PS... For those who simply must know before the neurons can fire:
The new 5.1 servers are Dell R420 systems configured as follows:
- 2 x 6Core Xeon E5-2420 1.9 Ghz 15MB Cache processors
- 48 GB 1333Mhz RDIMMS
- 4 x 7.2K 1TB Near-Line SAS 6Gps drives in a RAID 10
- PERC H310 Raid Controller
- Onboard Broadcom 5720 NICs
The systems won't support dozens of VM's each but they should be able to facilitate burying the NIC with a simple file copy... which they can do in every configuration except 1 (see items 1-6 above).
Thanks