I have a VMware ESX server 3.5 deployment on a brand new server class machine; and the VI Client installed on my laptop. I'm connected to the network via cable, not wireless. I have a configured VM that's about 40GB and would like to clone this to make more VMs.
First I tried using the VMWare Converter utility, electing to configure new Machine name, Windows server license, static IP, etc. Once the conversion task starts to go, estimates 5 hours to convert. I don't think it should take nearly that long, am I wrong? What could the problem be?
As an alternative, I tried using the VI Client interface to download the existing VM folder from the data store, alter the files as needed, and then upload back to data store as a new VM. Again this process seems longer than it should be. The download took a more than 2 hours and the upload seems it would take 3 hours or more (had to estimate based on the progress bar because the time-remaining message fluctuates wildly between a few minutes and several hours remaining).
Should cloning take this long by either method or is something definitely wrong. Also is there a better way to clone my VMs that I don't know of?