I have started the upgrade of my VMware Infrastructure from ESX v4.1 Update 1 WITH the Service Console to ESX 5i (obviously with no Service Console). I wiped the system disks and loaded ESX 5i cleanly. I have noticed that "some" of my vRanger backups are taking an extremely longer amount of time to run. This does not happen all of the time, but it is occurring fairly regularly. Also, most all of my backup times are taking longer than in the past to complete. My vRanger configuration is setup to run within a VM in a VMware cluster with my vCenter server. My VMFS data stores are running FC disks over a SAN connection via dual HBA's. We are writing to a backup location accross the LAN.
I read an earlier Quest forum post from around May 2011 stating that vRanger v5.0 was experiencing performance problems due to the lack of a Service Console. The post stated that because of the lack of a Service Console that vRanger now had to read the data over the LAN instead of using the Service Console and reading the data over the SAN and that was what was causing the performance issues. The post went on to state that this problem was supposed to be fixed with v5.1 of vRanger. I am currently running vRanger v5.3.0.23489 on a fresh install of vRanger (not upgraded from an earlier version of vRanger) on a newly installed VM that is Windows 2008 R2 with 2 vCPU's and 4.0 GB of RAM.
Does anyone know if the performance problem I am seeing is related to the lack of a Service Console in ESX 5i? Has anyone else noticied this behavior? Is there a fix?