When running some P2Vs recently using the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone client (version 5.5.3) and was surprised to encounter extremely slow transfer rates….like 206 KB/s slow! The physical machines were several buildings away from the central datacenter so I expected some slowness but not this as these servers were really quite bland in their use case and utilization.
According to VMware Article ID 2020517, VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.x default the converter worker encrypts the data stream using SSL. Encrypting the traffic increases security, but it can decrease performance.
To disable the encryption of the P2V data stream:
1.Browse to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
2. Open the converter-worker.xml file using a text editor (I used Notepad)
3. Locate the <useSsl></useSsl> tag under the <nfc> heading. By default it has a value of true.
4. Change the value to false as shown below and then save and close the file.
5. Restart the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker service on the machine.
6. Execute the P2V
In my case, the P2Vs jumped from 206 KB/s to roughly 4 MB/s which was fine given the physical topology of the environment and the fact that I wasn’t in any particular hurry or time crunch (I had about a 36 hr. window) to get the P2V completed.
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