I am migrating a few XenServer VM’s between AMD and Intel pools for a customer and stumbled across a faster way to do the export than through XenCenter.
From the Windows host where XenCenter is installed, run the following command:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\XenCenter\xe.exe -s x.x.x.x -u root -pw xxx vm-export vm=SERVERNAME filename=C:\users\user\folder\SERVERNAME.xva --nossl
The trick here is that part of the slowness of the export is SSL encoding/decoding happening within XenCenter. By using the –nossl option, you are bypassing that abstraction? application layer. Also making it less secure but let’s not dwell on the facts.