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AlbieNorth
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Questions re WAN accelerator

Post by AlbieNorth »

Hi,

I am a relative newbie to Veeam - we have used it for a year and have backups offsite but not a lot of testing done on them to date. Our other IT guy set things up and "got things going" but now I am digging in before we start to do some testing. A few questions:

- he said we are using the WAN accelerator - it seems to me to use this that there must be a software component installed at each site (onsite and offsite are connected by a 50mb vlan). vCenter is installed offsite. It seems to me that the WAN accelerator cannot be running if there is only software installed offsite. Note: we have veeam essentials with 3 vmware hosts so it's possible we could not install veeam on both sites.

- is there a way for me to be able to tell if the WAN accelerator is indeed working. When I looked at his setup it showed the cache pointing to C:\VeeamCache but when I look in there, there are no files (so me-thinks there is no accelerator running). Or is this directory only populated during a backup session?

- was reading about how veeam helps to identify the bottleneck in the job. All our jobs seem to indicate that is is the source (99%). But the other IT guy says it is the bandwidth between our two sites (50mb on a vlan). He says you can see that this is the bottleneck while the job is running. Is there a way to confirm this (more detail some place?).

Thanks.
pawel
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Re: Questions re WAN accelerator

Post by pawel »

I am new to evaluating Veeam so hopefully someone can confirm what I'm saying.

The way Veeam installs to another server can be a bit confusing at first but makes perfect sense once you play with it and do some digging. You want to install the main Veeam server at your primary location. Veeam can then deploy to other Windows servers as long as you simply "deploy" the WAN accelerator module to that other server. You won't have the full Veeam installation on that second server, but the WAN accelerator portion of it will be. The way this works is you have to make sure you specify the proper credentials and IP/DNS address on the target so the primary backup server can install software to the remote server. This is all done in the Wizard for deploying a new WAN accelerator (or modifying an existing one).

To check if the WAN accelerator is working the best way I know to do this is to see how much data is actually being transferred over the WAN link. You can do this by looking at the read, processed, and transferred values when the job is running. If the transfer rate is much smaller than the read/processed rate the WAN accelerator is likely working. I believe you can also look at the traffic on your WAN and verify it isn't saturated the entire time of the backup, but I haven't done testing on this front (yet) so others would have to chime in to verify this.

The fact the source is the bottleneck I believe means the connection or processing power on the source backup server is slower than the target server. Is that the case?
veremin
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Re: Questions re WAN accelerator

Post by veremin »

- he said we are using the WAN accelerator - it seems to me to use this that there must be a software component installed at each site (onsite and offsite are connected by a 50mb vlan). vCenter is installed offsite. It seems to me that the WAN accelerator cannot be running if there is only software installed offsite. Note: we have veeam essentials with 3 vmware hosts so it's possible we could not install veeam on both sites.
WAN Accelerators should be installed on both sites, indeed.
- is there a way for me to be able to tell if the WAN accelerator is indeed working. When I looked at his setup it showed the cache pointing to C:\VeeamCache but when I look in there, there are no files (so me-thinks there is no accelerator running). Or is this directory only populated during a backup session?
Go to the session statistics of a given job, and check there whether WAN Accelerators are in use.
- was reading about how veeam helps to identify the bottleneck in the job. All our jobs seem to indicate that is is the source (99%). But the other IT guy says it is the bandwidth between our two sites (50mb on a vlan). He says you can see that this is the bottleneck while the job is running. Is there a way to confirm this (more detail some place?).
Please, check our FAQ for more information regarding bottleneck.

Thanks.
AlbieNorth
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Re: Questions re WAN accelerator

Post by AlbieNorth »

- he said we are using the WAN accelerator - it seems to me to use this that there must be a software component installed at each site (onsite and offsite are connected by a 50mb vlan). vCenter is installed offsite. It seems to me that the WAN accelerator cannot be running if there is only software installed offsite. Note: we have veeam essentials with 3 vmware hosts so it's possible we could not install veeam on both sites.
I did not set this up but from what I can see, there cannot be an accelerator installed.

--> the Veeam software is installed offsite because the other IT guy said that with our license, we could only install it once and for DR purposes, it needed to be offsite where we want to restore from. So there is a server there with Veeam B&R on it. There are no servers that I know of at the primary site that would have this installed (unless Veeam installs it on the fly as needed)
- is there a way for me to be able to tell if the WAN accelerator is indeed working. When I looked at his setup it showed the cache pointing to C:\VeeamCache but when I look in there, there are no files (so me-thinks there is no accelerator running). Or is this directory only populated during a backup session?
--> when I look at the job details, under de-dupe, all the jobs say 1.0x (i.e. no deduping). Does this indicate no accelerator?
foggy
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Re: Questions re WAN accelerator

Post by foggy »

AlbieNorth wrote: --> the Veeam software is installed offsite because the other IT guy said that with our license, we could only install it once and for DR purposes, it needed to be offsite where we want to restore from. So there is a server there with Veeam B&R on it. There are no servers that I know of at the primary site that would have this installed (unless Veeam installs it on the fly as needed)
You can open the Backup Infrastructure node and review all the WAN accelerators installed in your environment under WAN Accelerators.
AlbieNorth wrote: --> when I look at the job details, under de-dupe, all the jobs say 1.0x (i.e. no deduping). Does this indicate no accelerator?
The corresponding record should be displayed to the right in the backup copy job session stats window (if you click Show Details).
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