How to analyse performance ESXi NFS Copy between datastores

datastorehard driveperformancevmware-esxi

I'm having trouble with ESXi backup/restore performance.

My setup:

  • VMWare ESXi 5.0.0 on a HP ProLiant DL 360 G6, runnnig RAID 5 on a P410 SmartArray as SAS
  • QNAP Nas (QNAP TS-809U-RP NAS 8 bays 4USB)
    Connected over Gigabit

I try to copy a 200 GB file from the NAS to the Datastore. Currently, it will take 10 hours, so the speed is about 5 MB/s. This is very slow and I'm currently trying to figure out why it is this slow.

  1. I ran esxtop on my ESXi machine, it shows mainly an idle process,
  2. I ran the QNAP system resource monitor, it shows bandwith usage of +- 10 MB/s, no real CPU usage..
  3. So it seems the ESXi server is limiting the transfer speeds somehow. Another hint for this is that the performance -> disk graph stays almost exactly on 15MB/s

What is the preferred way to find out what is limiting the speeds?

[Edit]

I copy the file through the UI (vSphere Client), right click the datastore, click 'copy', and in the other datastore 'paste'

Best Answer

The fastest way to accomplish this transfer would be to use a higher-level tool like VMWare vCenter Converter to perform the migration. How are you running the copy? Drag-and-drop? Unix cp from the console?

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