Well, when you get to play with some 10Gbps network gear, experiment a little you see some pretty nice file copy transfer times. But things are not very consistent. “It all depends”. So do experiment a lot & test things out. At a given moment you get rewarded with this:

That’s right. The most successful experiment was 61% of a 10Gbps pipe used and the file transfer speed for a 25GB vhd file was in one word amazing. We used jumbo frames and we disabled (same old story) except for the fact that this kind of throughput turns the receiving server in shell shocked piece of hardware. During the 35 seconds, it could get anything else done, bar for those poor disks. Perhaps you’ll want to throttle it down a little in a production environment.