Problem: Replication jobs, recovery jobs and Bare Metal Restores (BMR) are taking a very long time to complete with a Virtual Appliance.
Cause: This may be due to a number of different reasons:
- The Axcient Virtual Appliance may not have enough of the compute / memory /storage / networking resources it needs to ensure good performance. This usually happens when it is overloaded with too many VMs on the Virtual Host that runs the Axcient Virtual Appliance.
- The VM storage subsystem is too slow (as measured in IOPS) to ensure adequate performance. The most common scenario where this occurs is if a Network Area Storage (NAS) is used as a VM datastore, since NAS is often slower than local storage or Storage Area Networks (SANs), especially over a Gigabit Ethernet connection.
- There are too many VMware snapshots of the Axcient Virtual Appliance. Allowing snapshots to balloon in size over time has been implicated by VMware as a leading cause of VM slowdown.
Solution: The user can do the following to resolve these issues:
- Migrate VMs off the Virtual Host running the Axcient Virtual Appliance, until the problems abate.
- Move the Axcient Virtual Appliance from slower storage to a faster one.
- Delete VM snapshots periodically as discussed in the following VMware KB Articles: