Virtual Appliance Mode 4.1 - Best practise and timings

[icebun]

I have just installed 4.1 and did some timings on a single vm (25GB)

Using vAppliance Mode (Virtual Appliance):-

Full Backup to D:\ drive (actually a large VMDK file) :- 9Mins @ 45MB/S

Full Back to VMFS volume (through an ESX 3.5 host):- 11mins @ 38MB/S

Are these realistic times I should be getting or am I missing a step?

In addition, despite the drop in speed, I am also assuming that the latter step is the most efficient way rather than have a VMDK file house in effect mutiple VMDK files.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

Yes, this looks good for full backup speed assuming you have iSCSI shared storage.

[icebun]

Hey Gostev,

OK should I use the backup destination via the ESX host to the VMFS volume rather than to VMDK file?

Is there any performance hit on the ESX host in question?

[Gostev]

Compression will be done on target ESX host in this scenario, so it would be best to choose "Low" compression in the advanced job settings to remove any performance hit on the target ESX.

For Virtual Appliance mode, your backup target options are:
- Windows share (NAS with CIFS support, or regular Windows box)
- Linux box (NFS)
- ESX host (VMFS)