While both Uber and Uber2 now have NFS and iSCSI shared storage, a bottleneck was noticed on the network. With iSCSI configured on Uber, the initial cold Storage vMotion of a Windows Server 2008 VM (10GB partition) took the better part of 4 hours to complete.
Looking at network performance, the NIC seemed to be peaking at about 3Mbps, which calculated out correctly with the speed of the migration. At the moment, the E1000 virtual NIC is being used on Linux.
It is well documented that VMware Tools has the VMXNET network drivers that are optimized for VM's. While there is no built package for VMware Tools on Ubuntu, VMware did release an open source version, but this needs to be built.
Some searching found this procedure:
http://www.gorillapond.com/2009/03/09/install-vmware-tools-on-ubuntu-linux-reborn/
Once again, Uber2 was used for the test install of VMware Tools and then Uber was updated.
After the code install and before changing the NIC card, network throughput while copying ISO files from Uber to Uber2 improved slightly to about 3.8Mbps. Once the VMXNET 3 NIC was configured, this jumped up to 7.7Mbps.
To test this with a VMware function, another Ubuntu server VM with 16GB of thick storage was Storage vMotion'ed from shared storage (Uber on cresskill) to local ESXi host storage (local disk on westwood). This cold Storage vMotion took about 6 minutes.
Will redo (cold migration) the initial Win2k8001 test to see a real apples-to-apples test, but there was a significant improvement after VMware Tools. Also, going to look at "ethtool" which can set the link speed. The NIC cards could still be running at 10Mbps.
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