I am in the process of designing an vSphere 5.1 environment with a bunch of non-clustered hosts in branch office environments around the world. As part of a DR strategy, I am using PowerCLI to create a clone of the Windows VM to a second datastore on the same host.
One of these clone processes (in the copying files phase) was in progress when the connection between vCenter and the host was interrupted for 30 seconds. At this point the clone process failed.
My question is this: Once the VM clone is in progress and the file copy is happenning I would have thought that the file is copied locally and not "through" vCenter. Is this true?
In the final solution the vCenter will be on the other side of a WAN lnk from the host and so the copy needs to be local.
Also, if the copy is local, why would a temporary loss of access to vCenter cause the copy to fail?
vCenter and ESXi are both version 5.1.