Fastest way to move a large file from an ESXi host to another

I have two VMWare ESXI 5 hosts and I want to move a 2 TB .vmdk file from one to another. I tried downloading the file via vSphere Client to upload it to the other host via vSphere Client, but it seems that it would take a week or more!

I tried scp command and the speed was not bad, actually 30 MB/s, but the operation broke after a while.

Is there any way to split that 2 TB file into smaller files, so that I can transfer it easier? Or is there a better solution to transfer it?

The best generic approaches are:

• Export the VM as an OVF file, move to a local system, then reimport the OVF to your ESXi destination.
• Use vSphere and perform a host/storage migration.
• Leverage one of Veeam's free products to handle the ad hoc move.

Solutions like rsync or scp will be rate-limited and have no knowledge of the content (e.g. sparse VMDK files, thin-provisioned volumes, etc.)

Also see:

Move VMware ESXi VM to new datastore - preserve thin-provisioning

How to export a VMware ESXi 5 VM into a file to restore it later?

Similar situation here (though my file sizes were more in the 100's of gb). SFTP works a treat - filezilla is saying around 9mib/s. Tried with the datastore browser but that seemed to die at 4gb of transfers.

I already had ssh enabled, which by default may also have allowed the sftp function without any further config. Maybe - all I know is IMHO SFTP is the way to go - for both size and speed .