ESXi 6.0 - How long to install a copy of Server 2012?

[Dajinn]

Anyone have some rough estimates on how long it takes them to install an instance of Server 2012 R2 onto a VM? When I was first playing with ESXi it was quite fast, about 4 minutes easily. I don't know what I did but it's not rather slow. It seems to hang around getting files ready for installation; or rather, that's where the slowness comes in.

I've got 2 dedicated ports on the onboard NIC of my R610 bound to VMKernel ports for iSCSI and set the storage pool for round robin.

Any other performance increasing tips so I can get installs done much faster? Idk why it's so slow all of a sudden...

 

[whitey]

My W2K12 installs seems to take just a few mins (3-5) on vSphere6 on NFS storage (hybrid ZFS pool) over 10G jumbo networking.

 

[Dajinn]

I wonder if the MSFT iSCSI protocol is just complete garbage. I have a feeling that when I was seeing fast installs I was using StarWind's virtual SAN software. Do you have anything special set up on your ESXi environment? Or do you just use a dedicated 10G port for iSCSI.

 

[whitey]

10g NFS...not iSCSI here, used iscsi, meh, easier to multipath but if you know what your doing w nfs, multi ips/subnets and 10g helps inherently of course then I have never looked back from nfs...i'll list a hit list of what I see as advantages in a bit

 

[T_Minus]

I installed from the ESXI Datastore in a couple minutes, nothing long or out of ordinary.

 

[mrkrad]

Install time is about 8 minutes over 10gb NFS to windows 2008R2 NFS share (not efficient at all!)

 

[TuxDude]

It can be pretty fast if you can handle the IO load. For maximum speed don't forget that the VM also needs high speed access to read from the ISO - if the source ISO is coming over as virtual media over a 1G connection from your desktop that can slow things down.

 

[whitey]

Well theres you problem...windows nfs haha...no in all seriousness, is jumbo end-to-end including phys switches, vswitch and vmkernel ports configured/validated? My 10g nfs on omni w hybrid pool (magnetic and ssds for accel) kicks out a 2k12 vm in abt 2-3mins

 

[Dajinn]

Thanks for the responses.

Yeah actually, I used 2 of the GbE nics on my R610 for MPIO and I actually received my PowerConnect 5448 switch in the mail a couple of weeks back, finally got around to testing everything. I keep ISOs on local storage for now and after configuring MPIO and using a new switch instead of my ASUS RT-N66U router I'm seeing pretty fast install times again, no more than 4-5 minutes to install Server 2012 ONTO network attached storage.