I have a cluster of VM Hosts that have dual 10Gig NICs. I have a PowerCLI script that will clone out 50 VMs one after another. I'm using Starwind as my iSCSI storage solution. When I clone a single VM I'm seeing 6 to 8 gigabit of traffic on my Starwind box. If I clone two VMs at once I see 14 to 15 gigabit of traffic.
My question is why don't I get 14 to 15 (or better yet 20) gigabit of traffic when cloning a single VM?
I have the bandwidth. If I run ATTO Disk Benchmark inside a single VM on one of my hosts, it can generate over 20 gigabit of traffic. I assume a lot of that is hitting the Starwind cache, but at least I know a single host and the Starwind service can saturate my network bandwidth, which does not happen when cloning.
I know I have more storage speed since I can clone two VMs to the same iSCSI target and take only maybe a 10% hit on the storage speed.
Is there some advanced setting that tells vSphere not to use all the available network/storage capacity while cloning?
I'd appreciate any advice on maximizing the speed that vSphere can clone VMs,
Thanks,
David