Hi,
I am running into a problem that I do not understand. I am playing around with NFS datastores at the moment as I plan to use them for a vCD environment. While testing, I noticed that cloning operations take a very long time. For example, if I clone a VM with 40GB provisioned and 10GB used, it takes about 5 minutes. During the clone operation I can see the network utilization to go up until it saturates the 1Gb link. 5 minutes seems to be the right time for copying 40GB of data, but remember that there is only 10GB in use. As this seemed strange I created a new, empty VM with 40GB provisioned and nothing used (only about 100kB which are the configuration files and an empty VMDK). Cloning this VM takes again 5 minutes and I can see the network saturate. So why is ESX copying 40GB even if there is no data? I tried the same on an VMFS datastore and the operation takes about a second, which is what I would expect. Any hints appreciated.
Regards,
Henning