Replication and Compression

[JoeH]

Greetings!

When we do a replication job, is the data that is transferred between the two ESXi machines compressed while it is in transport on the LAN/WAN?

Thanks - Joe

[Gostev]

Hello Joe, no - in case of ESXi, network traffic compression does not happen. Traffic compression is only used with "full" ESX. We install non-persistent agent in the source and target ESX service console to do the network traffic compression, and since ESXi has its service console inaccessible, this is no longer possible.

[JoeH]

Ouch....that explains why the replication initialization job requires 5x longer than it should.

I'll have to experiment with initializing the replication to a separate file, compressing it, sending that over that WAN, then putting everything back.

Maybe SureBackup will include compression for ESXi hosts and replication over a WAN?

Thanks - Joe

[Gostev]

Speed issue may not be due to lack of compression - ESXi are just generally slow when it comes to disk write speed. But you should be OK after initial replication is done and forever-incremental passes start, as only changes since last pass will be transferred over WAN and written to the target ESXi storage.

No, SureBackup has nothing to deal with replication (as the name implies).

[JoeH]

Heh heh - perhaps V5 will fix this....ESXi V5!