We have an ESXi box hosted with Rackspace, it took a bit of pushing to get them to install ESXi it in the first place as they tried to get us to use their cloud offering. But this is a staging environment and we want something dedicated on hardware we control so we can get an idea of performance without other people’s workloads muddying the water.

Anyway, I’ve been having a bit of fun getting our server template uploaded to it, which is only 11GB compressed – not exactly large, but apparently large enough to be inconvenient.

In my experience the datastore upload tool in the vSphere client frequently fails on large files. In this case I was getting the “Failed to log into NFC server” error, which is probably due to a requisite port not being open. I didn’t like that tool anyway, move on.

The trusty-but-slow scp method was also failing however. Uploads would start but consistently stall at about the 1GB mark. Not sure if it’s a buffer or something getting filled in dropbear (which is designed to be a lightweight ssh server and really shouldn’t need to deal with files this large), but Googling didn’t turn up much.
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