All, On Saturday in the early morning, I performed a V2V of the VM, moving it from an ESX 3.5 box to an ESXi 4.1 box. After that was done, I manually started the backups, and they all finished by Sunday at 15:00. That's a quarter of the time that it has been taking recently - probably a bit faster than before it had *really* started slowing down a few months ago.
There are several factors at play here, so I hesitate to give too much credit to any one thing, but I wanted to note a few things that I think are interesting: 1) The V2V involved a conversion change of the VM from a type 4 to a type 7 VM. 2) At startup of the VM after the V2V, I found that it had 4 phantom NICs - 2 Intel E1000s from when it had been P2V'ed, and 2 VMWare NICs from the V2V. I deleted them, using techniques learned while paying attention on this list (THANK YOU, David, Anders, Mike, Steven, Ben, Jim, et al - I kept the thread from 2012-01-02 titled "Neat tip of the week"). 3) As noted already, the host went from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1 4) The two hosts have what I would judge (with a SWAG) to be roughly VM load, modulo the file server itself 5) The two hosts have the same amount of ram (16gb), but the ESX 3.5 box is dual proc/dual core E5405s (2GHz), and the ESXi 4.1 box is a single quad-core proc (X3470 @3GHz). 6) The ESX 3.5 boxes NICs are not optimally configured, which I discovered after digging down on the box during the V2V process - essentially the 4 NICs are grossly misallocated, and I'll need to correct that at some point. The ESXi 4.1 box has 6 NICs, and their configuration is *much* better. Lastly, I started a perfmon session against the file server before starting the backups, and have set it to run for 4 days. I'll be looking at it when it stops on Tuesday, and will let folks know what I see. However, the results so far are so stellar that I expect to find nothing out of the ordinary. I do expect to transition file services to a new Win2k8 R2 box in the medium term, but this takes a great big load off my mind. Kurt ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
