Time involved in cloning virtual machine ??

[mmcintosh99]

Environment 2 ESX 3.0 servers Dell 2950's (4 NIC's per server 1NIC Service console 1 NIC VMotion 2 NIC's Virtual Network) and 1 AX150 FC array (5 500Gb drives Raid 5 single virtual disk shared between both servers)

I would like to know the time it take to clone a virtual machine? It takes 6 hours to clone a machine. Should it take that long? Is there a way to speed this up?

Mark

[wcrahen]

No it should not take that long to clone a VM, how big is your VM? A typical 8 to 10GB VM should take maybe 10 minutes or so to clone, mileage may vary, but certainly not 6 hours. What is the method you are using?

[mmcintosh99]

Method:

I have tried both methods presented in the gui I have not tested the command line method (convert to template and clone from template - also striaght clone from existing machine)

8 - 10GB ?? How are you judging VM size ??

[wcrahen]

How big are the virtual disks attached to your VM you are trying to clone?

[kix1979]

If memory serves me, this is part of a known issue for VC 2.0. I cannot find the post, but I think the issue is that VC is not passing the proper flag to ESX 3 so it is performing a clone in a very slow fashion. This should get fixed with VC 2.0.1.

[mmcintosh99]

Windows 2003 servers R2 standard edition with 50Gb C: drives. Is there a best practice for Disk sizing in a vm?? I use the size due to the fact that with constant updates I have run out of space with only 20Gb drivesin the past. What is a best practice for large data drives? I have only one array with which to work and want all data as well as vm's stored within it.

[DarrenBolton]

I generally deploy all my virtual machines with a 10GB system drive and if further space is required for applications/user data I just add on a extra virtual drive to the size that is required.

[ilatimer]

This is a known issue in Virtual Infrastructure 3.0. VMware has stated that this issue will be addressed in the upcoming 3.01 release schedule for sometime in October. Here is a link to a discussion regarding the performance issue you are seeing.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=49154&tstart=0

[mmcintosh99]

The issue was an installation issue as the AX150 system is a dual controller system and has a APC that has to be integrated in order for write caching to be enabled. As we did not get the cable leading from the APC to the AX150 we had not noticed it. Upon review by an EMC support we found we were having lag issues and overall slowness with the entire system. Installed the cable and we have resolved most issues. I will still be upgrading to the 3.0.1 ASAP

Mark

[MBallard]

We just upgraded to ESX 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1 last week and this week it's taking 4 hours to clone a virtual machine and about 1 hour to take a snapshot of one of our VM's.

Has anyone else experienced this as a result of this upgrade? We were previously running 3.0. and 2.0.

MBallard

[Hoppa]

Yep. Same issue here: takes about 52 minutes to copy a 10Gb VM. Situation: 4x ESX 3.0.1, VC 2.0.1 (running as VM) on NetApp SAN.

I'm about to implement update 2 for VC and the latest patches for ESX and will post asap if the problem has been fixed or not.

[sheetsb]

Has there been any update on this? We tried to clone a VM yesterday (host ESX 3.0.1 build 39823, VC 2.0.1 build 32042) and it eventually failed after about an hour and half. The VM is Win2k3 Standard, three virtual disks (10gb, 10gb and 60gb) for a MS SQL system.

Bill S.