Original Post is here.  Re-posted here for my own convenience.

Turning off SSL inscreased my transfer speed from 4Mbps to 22 Mbps.

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If you haven’t checked out VMware Converter 5 yet, you should. There are a lot of really nice enhancements, the two big ones being vSphere 5 support and automatic partition alignment (which is huge in a shared storage environment).

If you have checked it out, you may have noticed it can be a heck of a lot slower than 4.3.

There are a few reasons (in my experience) for this:

1. If you are REDUCING partition sizes, the file copy method will switch from block based (1’s and 0’s) to file based (think fragmentation / seek speed / etc), which can really slow things down.
   1. If you are increasing partition sizes, this does not apply.
   2. Recommended practice would be to just drop the allocation method to Thin provisioning (which you can do right from inside converter)
2. If you are running Converter 5 with the default settings, converter is encrypting all traffic from the source machine to the ESX(i) host over SSL. On older machines (or machines with a tight maintenance window), this is especially painful. Either way, if you want the fastest possible converter experience (and don’t care about someone sniffing your conversion), Disable NFC SSL in the converter configuration file (steps taken from the converter release notes):
   1. Disable NFC SSL
      1. Open the converter-worker.xml configuration file. It is usually located in C:ProgramDataVMwareVMware vCenter Converter Standalone folder.
         or
         C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataVMwareVMware vCenter Converter Standalone
      2. Set the key Config/nfc/useSsl to false. Save the configuration file.
      3. Restart the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker service