Slow local file transfer (copy) on ESX vmware server

The first thing to understand is that you're sharing the 1GB connection with other virtual machines. You're not the only person using the network. Ask how many other virtual servers are on that same host. If you're really nice, the sysadmins might let you look at the VMware Virtual Center Performance tab, which will show you the network use overall.

Next, windows drag & drop file copies aren't very efficient. One trick for speeding up file copies (if you really have to do this often) is to do it with the hosts via SCP/FTP instead. This isn't a quick setup, but here's how it works:

• Set up an FTP server on the VMware host (the same one the guest is running on)
• FTP (or SCP, if your sysadmins don't allow FTP) from the Windows guest to that VMware host (will run blazing fast since it doesn't actually go over the network - all file transfer is in the same host)
• From your physical boxes running Windows, connect to the VMware host's FTP/SCP server and grab the file.

Like I said, not easy, but once you do it it's blazing fast. It will still be constrained by the network that you're sharing with other virtual machines, though. For best practices, VMware recommends using multiple network connections, and you might be able to sweet-talk your sysadmins into using a separate network adapter for the FTP/SCP server.

If you want a really comprehensive solution, check out the VI Power Documenter. It may be overkill for you though.

Here is a PowerShell script which will grab most of the info you were looking for and export to a CSV which you can easily work with in Excel of course.

param ( $Path )
Connect-VIServer -Server MyVIServer
$HDPrimarySize = @{
    Name = "Primary HD Size (GB)"
    Expression = { $_.HardDisks[0].CapacityKB / 1MB }
}
$AvgMemUsage = @{
    Name = "Mem Usage (Daily Avg %)"
    Expression = { ($_ | Get-Stat -Stat mem.usage.average -MaxSamples 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue ).Value }
}
$vm = Get-VM
$output = $vm | Select-Object Name, MemoryMB, NumCpu, $HDPrimarySize, $AvgMemUsage 
$output | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation -Path $Path