With ESXi, short of using the "hack" console, the only way I found to transfer files is with the VSphere client.
It appears we have several systems properly configured and running as VM's now. To back them up I shut down the VM's and did a copy of the data store folders containing the VM's to a shared folder on the network.
It's taking an extremely long time (132 gig so far and it's still copying them); is there a way to compare the two, the original and copy, to see if they're intact? Since it's ESXi I couldn't just tar+zip them and create an md5 checksum.
Also, if I were to plug a USB external drive to the ESXi server, would it automatically show up as another datastore, so I could copy directly from Datastore1 to DatastoreX more quickly?
Two questions related to transferring data…wondered if anyone else out there had some experience doing this…
Best Answer
You can't access USB storage from within ESXi unfortunately so that's not a runner. What you can do is use Veeam FastSCP as an alternative to using either the VI Client or something like the VI-Toolkit which is really just using the same mechanism. External SAS enclosures are an option - you can hot add storage that way. You've already discovered the NAS option.
What sort of copy speed are you seeing? - If nothing else is interfering you should expect to be able to hit 50+Meg/sec over GigE, maybe even a lot more if the NAS target and your source datastores are fast enough. USB would top out at not much better than around 30-40Meg a second so in most cases you would expect GigE to a decent NAS to be faster.