Background/Environment Architecture:
My current environment for $corp_overlords$ is set up in a hub-and-spoke model with a technologically well-endowed home office hub (SAN, bladecenter/bladesystem ESXi cluster, fiber internet connection, etc.) connected to a number of remote site spokes that are not so well off, and typically contain single ESXi host server and connect to the home office hub via a T1. All traffic originating at any remote site routes back to the home office over a "MPLS network" (which is really just a T1 connecting the remote site to the home office).
At the home office, on the SAN, we have a number of VM templates that I have created to deploy VMs from. They are stored in an NFS volume, that is a vSphere datastore, attached to the home office datacenter object within vSphere.
Each remote site has a corresponding vSphere datacenter object, containing a datastore object that's connected to the locally-attached storage on the ESXi host server physically located at the remote site.
As these VM templates exist on the NFS volume, they occupy ~ 40 GiB (thin-provisioning). As files on NTFS (or a Linux FS), they occupy ~100 GiB.
Question:
How should I copy this 40 GiB of thin-provisioned data (that occupies 100 GiB of filesystem space) between my sites?
I am under the constraints that I have approximately 5 days to do so, and cannot interfere (noticeably) with "normal network traffic."
Answer
How about using ovftool to copy the templates directly between hosts?
I have used this for VMs before, and it works pretty well. Not sure if that also works for templates, but if not then you can just covert the templates temporarily to VMs for copying them.
Instructions, with an example are here.
You could also use ovftool to convert your templates to .ovf packages, which should be very compact, and then transfer the packages between datacenters with BITS or FTP or SCP or whatever protocol you want.
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