Speed up vCenter Converter in Stand-alone mode

When performing a P2V on your local network you may not require a secured transfer mechanism.  By default the conversion process using the stand-alone VMware Converter 5 is configured to use SSL to encrypt network traffic. If you do not need to secure this traffic on your local network you can change a configuration setting in the converter worker configuration file to disable the use of SSL. On my network this can speed up the conversion process considerably, sometimes to nearly half the time, depending on the specifications of the source server, how busy it is, how much RAM is available, and network conditions (backups, firewalls, WAN, etc.).

The setting to change is in the application data folder under the all users directory, in the file called converter-worker.xml, and the value is stored within the <useSsl> tag. Change the value from true to false.

I came across this setting while troubleshooting slow conversions of older servers with only 1 GB RAM installed shortly after this version was released, but I see that VMware now has a KB describing this as well.

Hope this helps someone!