BRC - Replications, restores, and BMR take a long time with the vApp

Problem: Replication jobs, recovery jobs and Bare Metal Restores (BMR) are taking a very long time to complete with a Virtual Appliance.

Cause: This may be due to a number of different reasons:

1. The Axcient Virtual Appliance may not have enough of the compute / memory /storage / networking resources it needs to ensure good performance. This usually happens when it is overloaded with too many VMs on the Virtual Host that runs the Axcient Virtual Appliance.
2. The VM storage subsystem is too slow (as measured in IOPS) to ensure adequate performance. The most common scenario where this occurs is if a Network Area Storage (NAS) is used as a VM datastore, since NAS is often slower than local storage or Storage Area Networks (SANs), especially over a Gigabit Ethernet connection.
3. There are too many VMware snapshots of the Axcient Virtual Appliance. Allowing snapshots to balloon in size over time has been implicated by VMware as a leading cause of VM slowdown.

Solution: The user can do the following to resolve these issues:

1. Migrate VMs off the Virtual Host running the Axcient Virtual Appliance, until the problems abate.
2. Move the Axcient Virtual Appliance from slower storage to a faster one.
3. Delete VM snapshots periodically as discussed in the following VMware KB Articles:
   • http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008885
   • http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025279