We have been discussing a challenge that I wanted to throw out to the wider community. The challenge is what is the best method to restore a large (VMware) virtual machine?
Some context:
- 7-Mode 8.x environment
- vSphere 5
- Virtual machines up or over 1.5TB in size
The customer is using VSC but when restoring the VM it is taking a very long time, consuming a lot of resource on the controller and they have had the restore fail.
Our understanding is that the VSC process is using SFSR so essentially doing a copy which is why it takes so long. A couple of suggestions that have been put forward:
- Using Storage VMotion to speed the process. If anyone has recent references to this and / or experience it would be useful
- Manually use sisclone to do it
Both methods are outside VSC which is a shame, but if anyone does have practical experience of either approach or another we would be keen to hear.
Many thanks
Craig Menzies