Evaluating Veeam Backup and Replication

[Mr_OCD]

Hi All,

I'm current evaluating your software with a view to using it to backup / replicate our VMware (vSphere) environment to a remote site.

At present I have it installed on a VM within our SAN (iSCSI) and can successfully backup / replicate other VM's but I'm getting some slow speeds... approx 20mbps which seems a little slow as I was expecting to see a minimum of 40-50mbps going by some examples online.

The backup / replication works but I get the following message:

'Unable to connect to shared storage.... failing over to network mode' which I suspect is the problem. But for the life of me I cannot get the backup / replication to work over shared storage ... can anyone make some suggestions to what I can try next?

Obviously the iSCSI SAN is the limitation but surely it should be much faster than this?

It is taking 25 mins to backup a 28GB VM...

Also for the remote DR site I was thinking of installing Veeam backup on both local and remote environments replicating incremental backup / replication over the WAN once the initial backup / replication has been completed. Does this sound feasible?

Its also worth noting we only have access to a 1MB (upload) line for the remote DR site. Is this going to be sufficient?

Apologies for all the questions - I'm new to Veeam products

[Gostev]

Hello Scott, sounds like you did not present iSCSI SAN to Veeam Backup server correctly, so Veeam Backup is unable to find direct connection to SAN and fails over to network backup mode. Which in turn suffers from the following VMware issue with ESX4 performance: Network backup slow on vSphere ESX 4.0.

Whether or not the link size will be sufficient depends on amount on daily changes on your VMs, you should observe incremental backup sizes and then just do some math on whether 1MB line is enough to handle this amount of data.

Thanks!
Anton

[Mr_OCD]

Hi Anton,

I have tried a few different configuration methods so far...

First I configured as per the user guide (automount off / present iSCSI to virtual machine) and this is giving around 5MB/s which is errrr slow... ... I have it running at the moment and it is currently on 2MB /s !

I then created a shared folder on my SAN which I used for the backup and saw speeds of approx 20MB / s which is a bit better but still far from correct.

We dont use VCB as have no experience of it ... we have been using VDR.

[Gostev]

What SAN make/model are you using? Should be at least 40MB/s with iSCSI SAN per feedback from other customers, even with entry-level SANs.
Do you have Veeam Backup installed on physical computer, or in VM?

[Mr_OCD]

What SAN make/model are you using? Should be at least 40MB/s with iSCSI SAN per feedback from other customers, even with entry-level SANs.
Do you have Veeam Backup installed on physical computer, or in VM?

Overland Storage SNAP 620 with 15k rpm SAS drives...

Veeam is installed on a VM.

[Gostev]

Did you give Veeam Backup VM 4 vCPUs? If not, please do that, then try to switch the job mode to vStorage API "Virtual Appliance" and see what performance do you get.

[Mr_OCD]

Did you give Veeam Backup VM 4 vCPUs? If not, please do that, then try to switch the job mode to vStorage API "Virtual Appliance" and see what performance do you get.

Thanks will try that ...

[Mr_OCD]

Can you clarify on what you mean by:

'try to switch the job mode to vStorage API "Virtual Appliance'

[Gostev]

See pg. 44 of the User Guide at Step 3. Select Backup Mode

[Mr_OCD]

See pg. 44 of the User Guide at Step 3. Select Backup Mode

Thanks ... sorted... just running now.

[Mr_OCD]

I am now getting 30mbps using the method you mention Anton... what would you suggest next?

I no longer get the error messages either

Thanks for your help so far!

[Mr_OCD]

Just ran a large VM of 140GB and now getting 48mbps!!!

[Gostev]

The job processing speed will vary per VM depending on the amount of empty (zeroed) space in VMDKs, VSS freeze and snapshot operations time (which all affect overall VM processing speed counter), and I would say you are getting pretty "normal" speed for full backup from iSCSI storage.

Did you check Task Manager to see if your Veeam Backup server does not starve on CPU when the job is running? If CPU is fine, then looks like this is as fast as ESX host can read data from your SAN. May be your SAN vendor can suggest additional tweaks as well to improve the speed, jumbo frames etc. - but it will only give pretty minor speed increase (if any), so may be it does not even worth to spend your time on this.

Also try running the job again now - incremental pass should be 5-10 times faster due to our product leveraging changed block tracking.

[Mr_OCD]

I've got a couple of VM migrations going on at the same time so the job processing speed is perfectly sufficient for my requirements...

Thanks for your help with this... I've been trying to get this sorted for weeks!

Now that I can backup the VM's quickly how would I go about doing the incremental backups over WAN for DR purposes?

Replication seems to take much longer and is limited to local SAN / Hosts so I think for WAN DR (remote) I would just be better off backing up nightly?

Any advice appreciated.

[Mr_OCD]

Getting CPU of about 60-80% constant... will try giving the VM more resources.

[Gostev]

Scott, did you consider syncing your backup files to remote site with DFS-R or rsync?

Here are some threads about this:
off-site backup ideas
Replicating .vbk Files Using DFS-R
Does anyone use RecoverPoint to replicate backups off-site?

[Gostev]

Getting CPU of about 60-80% constant... will try giving the VM more resources.

As long as CPU usage does not cap around 100% all the time when the job is running, all is well.

This is how it looks when you have issues with CPU usage on Veeam Backup server after the job starts chewing actual VMDKs
Below is 2 vCPU VM trying to handle the data FC8 SAN throws at it. Clearly not enough processing power there

[Mr_OCD]

Brilliant Stuff!! You have been most helpful