Hello,

I am running ESXi 4.0 update 1. I can transfer files to and from my guests to my laptop, which is on the same LAN. Same switch actually, as it's just a home setup. Recently, however, uploads to my datastore are horrendously slow (6 hrs to upload a 5GB ISO image). Speeds are equally poor from my physical machine and from one of the guest VMs. Everything else seems to be running fine. The two NICs look fine in my vSphere client, so I'm pretty much clueless here as to what to look for. Any ideas on where to start would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

Have you bounced (power cycle) your switch?
Are your speed/duplex matched on both NICS to the switch ports?
(set them to auto or hard set them - but match the switch port settings
to the nic settings)

Do you run antivirus software during this transfer? if so, have you tried to
disable it during the transfer?

Sometime drivers can do this too ... what drivers are you using?

All NICs on my home network are 1GB NICs, as is the switch. The switch has colored lights to indicate the transfer speed (orange for 10/100, green for GB), and they are green. My NICs show as 1000Mbps in vSphere console, so all of my settings are consistent. As far as the driver I am using, I assume you are referring to the drivers used in ESXi for the host server. I am using whatever driver comes in ESXi 4.0 U1, as the NICs are automatically recognized.

I appreciate you taking the time to reply. Any other ideas?

Much thanks,
Dave

So is the network speed to your VMs OK but uploading via the datastore browser in the vSphere client slow?

That is correct. Is that not bizarre?

There are a couple of items that will be a factor here.

1) Disk speed for vmkernel operations is capped so as to not negatively impact VM performance. I.e. so copying a file to the datastore won't overwhelm the disks and slow VM performance).

2) ESX(i) doesn't cache disk writes (to prevent corruption issues if power is lost) so disks without battery backed write cache will be slower than dealing with RAID controllers ith BBWC.

I've also found that SSH and vSphere client copies are slower with ESXi (than ESX). I don't have a specific answer on that one yet but with SSH ESXi is using an older daemon for this that is limited.

You can also add FTP server support to ESXi which may help performance.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_FTP.php