I have a new HP DL120 G7 server with ESXi5. One VM is a Win2003 instalation and I have an external USB2.0 drive attached by USB Controller and USB Device.
I copy a 4GB file from external USB to server disk.
In the VM that takes up to 10 minutes.
On a native Win2003 that takes aprox. 3 minutes.
I have no explaination for that diference:
- In any case the bottleneck is the USB connection, much slower than the disks (SAS, RAID1).
- If the USB connection on the VM would be USB1.1 and not USB2.0 it would take much more time.
- (The disk performance between server partitions on the VM is correct. -> see update)
- Could be that my native box is extremely fast and the VM is the normal case.
- ???
Update
As mentioned, i tried with passthrough and it is much better.
The best performance in this scenario would be achieved by passing the USB controller to the virtual machine (VT-D). Otherwise, you'll only get USB 1.1 speeds.