OVF Template imports into VMware Cloud Director are slower than expected

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• Template imports into VCD may appear to take significantly longer than expected.
• Log analysis shows that VCD completes placement tasks promptly, but delays occur during the subsequent disk transfer phase.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Director
• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware ESXi hosts
• NFS share used for data transfer between the VCD Appliances

Cause

• The delay is not caused by VCD. Placement tasks typically finish in under 10 minutes.
• The bottleneck occurs during the Layer 2 transfer of VMDK files from the VCD NFS share to the ESXi datastore.
• Each VM disk transfer may take 30 minutes or more.

Resolution

• Investigate and optimise the network path between the NFS server, the ESXi hosts, and the target datastore.
• Focus should be on Layer 2 throughput and performance during large disk transfers, as improvements here will directly reduce overall template import times.