weinstein5 wrote:
You will not be able to access the USB drive - have you looked at vSPhere Replication - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Introduction-to-vSphere-Replication.pdf?
Err, why not ? You can add a USB drive to the host, add a USB controller to the VM and then add the USB device to the VM which then enables you to copy data to / from.
You will unlikely find a USB3 port on a server though and as far as I know USB3 is not supported so you look at pretty slow copy speeds. Plus in my experience USB drives mounted are EXTREMELY slow, you won't be getting anywhere near full USB2 speed.
It obviously depends on many of your local factors (amount and size of the files being one of them), but in my experience it can easily take a lot longer than 13hrs ...
No way to know for certain unless you try though .. I had to do something similar and when both network and usb speed failed, I uploaded it via FTP to an external server and back down again - that was a lot quicker.
Edit: in fact, it even supports vMotion ..