Comments on: What’s wrong with the Datastore Browser?

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:19:13 +0000

Dave, I must disagree with you on the overall quality of the VIC Datastore Browser. It hasn’t failed me at all, and does what I need it to do. With the release of vSphere, I find that the Datastore Browser is even faster and gives a better overall impression.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:52:28 +0000

I find Veeam to work more reliably. The datastore browser is extremely flaky and as the rest of the VIC of dismal quality for an enterprise product.
Especially when connecting to vCenter rather than to ESX directly I don’t get any feedback whatsoever what is going on. I have no idea if the files copy or not, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
Never had an issue with Veeam FastSCP.

By: Anton

Anton — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:16:19 +0000

Just from the top of my head (there could be more), but the main reasons to use FastSCP instead of Datastore Browser are:
1) Support for Linux/NFS as source or target
2) Support for moving files between standalone ESX hosts (or between hosts in different vCenters)
3) Super fast ESX-ESX and ESX-Linux transfers due to compression
4) Access to ESX service console partitions
5) Built-in file editor (handy for tweaking ESX config files)
6) Windows, Linux, ESX drag-n-drop file management in a single console.

If you don’t need all this then yes, you don’t need FastSCP. But for me, it’s a true saviour.

By: Eric Siebert

Eric Siebert — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:09:30 +0000

I did a write up on that subject here and point out things that are different about the datastore browser compared to other methods.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/different-methods-for-browsing-vmfs-data-stores/

By: Stu

Stu — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:39:50 +0000

Yeh I think you hit the nail on the head – if you need host-to-host data xfr, FastSCP is great. But if not, there’s not really much of a need for it.