I know this question has been asked before and I saw the recommendations on using pigz. Good recommendations, but I wanted to see if I really have a "problem".
I have an esxi host. It's the free version so a lot of the enterprise tools don't work. It's also personal lab use so I'm not concerned greatly with high availability.
Currently to back up VMs, I have a script which shuts the VM off, copies the VM files from local storage to a 1gbe NAS, powers on the VM, and then tar -z the files over on the NAS itself.
I started recording some times just to see how long things took.
Example 1:
- 28GB VM vmdk file
- Time to copy: 5 min 21 sec
- Avg speed on copy: 713mbps
- Time to zip with compression: 1 hour 55 min
- Avg speed on zip w/ compression: 33mbps
Example 2:
- 95GB VM vmdk file
- Time to copy: 29 min 7 sec
- Avg speed on copy: 445mbps
- Time to zip with compression: 4 hour 3 min
- Avg speed on zip w/ compression: 53mbps
Really this is a non-issue since the VM starts up right after the copy completes, the tar -z could run for a day and not be noticed. Just wondering if that is normal speed for tar -z?
I checked the VM host and CPU and storage seem to both be idling. I checked the NAS and CPU and storage seem to be idling. I don't know if I want to go the full on pigz route and have it max out the VM host CPUs, on the other hand, a bit more speed would be nice.