Best configuration for HyperV

[theJonson]

I have a 3-node HyperV cluster running on a NetGear readynas 4200 - so no hardware VSS support.

Veeam is running off a separate physical server (HP DL360 G6 dual-quad 2.27ghz xeon - 4GB of RAM) which is writing to a directly attached iSCSI unit (4x SATA 3tb drives)

All the servers are connected at 1GB - the VMs are connected via a 20GB trunk
The backup target gets approximately 90 MB/s write speed.
Jumbo frames are enabled between the backup server and it's target, but not on the HyperV nodes.

With this setup, I get around 9 MB/s during a backup job average, with an occasional peak to ~15-16 MB/s

All of the available "best practice guides" I've read are focused around VM Ware, as there are no alternative options for HyperV proxies, either no proxy (on-host) or Direct SAN access which I cant use as I don't have Hardware VSS.

Am i missing something or is this the best Veeam can do with this setup?

[theJonson]

Forgot to add, all hosts / guests are Server 2008 R2 - and I'm using Veeam 7.0.0.771

[foggy]

James, what are the bottleneck stats reported by Veeam B&R for your jobs?

[theJonson]

Source 99% > Proxy 3% > Network 0% > Target 7%

[foggy]

Bottleneck source means that your production VM storage cannot provide data any faster.

[theJonson]

Just a follow, up that after some tweaking (namely Windows Updates and Driver updates) I managed to improve the speed to 50mbps which is a good improvement for simply keeping things up-to-date.

On a test rig I converted the SAN from RAID 6 to RAID 10 and this jumps the rate to approx. 100mbps.

[foggy]

Glad you've got such an improvement! Thanks for the follow up.

I would also note that you should be careful while configuring jumbo frames, as they should enabled everywhere within the given network segment, on every component. Missing at least one of them can turn against you.

Btw, what becomes your new bottleneck after those improvements, according to the job stats?

[antspants77]

On a hardware note, have you disabled "journaling" on the ReadyNAS
I got a bit of a performance jump at a site I was working on.
Longer boot up times, but faster performance.
Research before implementing this change.