SureBackup is very slow. How can I improve it?

[cparker4486]

Hello,

To make a long story short I am currently in the process of cleaning up after a failed upgrade of our ERP system.

SureBackup is a fantastic technology that's perfect for testing these kinds of things ahead of time but it is unbearably slow for me. My environment consists of two R710 ESXi 5.5 hosts (74GB RAM each) and one Equallogic PS4000X. Veeam and all its components are within that virtual infrastructure.

What additional hardware can I add to make SureBackup usable?

(Also, links to existing guides, forum discussions, and/or webinars that cover this topic are well appreciated.)

[foggy]

Chris, what kind of backup storage (where the tested backups are stored) do you have?

[cparker4486]

Those are stored on a Synology DS1812+ and I get an average of about 7MB/s during backups with the target being the bottleneck.

[foggy]

I assume this is the reason of the poor SureBackup performance. We are talking about running VMs off backup storage, so it should have I/O performance comparable to your production storage.

[cparker4486]

Is there a way to extract specific VMs at a certain restore point from an existing backup and create a new VBK from them? I have an idle machine with an SSD big enough to hold a few VMs but not the whole VBK and its VRBs.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you can use backup copy jobs to pull the required VM out of the existing backup file and create a new separate file for the VM. Alternatively, you can publish the VM at the required restore point with Instant VM Recovery, and then use VeeamZIP or regular backup job to create a dedicated backup file.

[Gostev]

Back during v5 beta testing, tsightler observed a few seconds faster boot times (power on to logon prompt) of SureBackup VM than the corresponding production VM. For this test, the backup files were sitting on the newer SAN that was in smoke testing before entering the service. While the production VM was running off busier and older production SAN. As you can see from this example, with SureBackup it's all about the backup storage performance (IOPS), and nothing else. Thanks!

[cparker4486]

Thanks for the further information, Gostev.

[cparker4486]

Yes, you can use backup copy jobs to pull the required VM out of the existing backup file and create a new separate file for the VM.

Could you expand on this a bit? I thought you meant I could use the Backup Copy's VBK as a source for the Application Group but that doesn't appear to be possible. I can only choose a Backup or Replica. What I did was create a Backup Copy of three VMs from the backup that resides on my slower (but large) storage device and put it on a faster array.

[foggy]

Currently backup files created by the backup copy jobs cannot be directly used in SureBackup jobs, however there's a workaround.

[cparker4486]

Thanks, foggy. That worked.

[cparker4486]

I've tried on a few occasions to get SureBackup to run but I guess my hosts are just too underpowered. The jobs always time out and that's even if I let them run for hours.

I have one old pro workstation (dual socket, ECC ram) that I could dedicate to the task but I don't have it in my budget to buy another license of vSphere for it (at the moment.)

What options do I have?

[Vitaliy S.]

Usually SureBackup job bottleneck is storage where backups are stored. Can you please tell me a bit more about your backup repository?

[cparker4486]

I'd actually been thinking it was the lack of RAM or CPU on the hosts that was slowing me down. It's a Synology DS1812+ with 8 x 2TB 7.2k SATA drives (1 hotspare).

[Vitaliy S.]

Nope, target storage IOPs and performance is the main thing to consider here.

[cparker4486]

You might have too many things on your plate when you have your own topic merged into your own topic.

[Vitaliy S.]

I had to do this merge

[frankive]

Hi.
Even with 2 SSD in Raid1 as the repository I feel our surebackup is prett slow.
Testing with 4 VMS and with a 2012 R2 vanilla server it will use 10-15 to start (ready to press ctrl-alt-delete).
I have always believed that IO is the the bottleneck in surebackup as it will do its magic with the reading from the backupfile.
But the resourcemanager just show between 6-9 MB/S of readspeed.
If i test the speed of the ssd drive outside Veeam it is superfast.
Also have alot of cpu and ram and no peek.
I run the surebackup on a hyper-v node attached with a 1Gb network card to veeam backup server.
I see it various between 180-240 MB/S in transfer while the VMs are booting up.

What could be the issue here?

[Shestakov]

Hi Frank,

You are correct, it`s usually all about Disk performance and high IO usage.
Have you observed the peak disk latency? As far as I know you are Veeam ONE user, do you have any alarms triggered during the surebackup job run?

Also slower performance is observed when verifying VMs from long backup chains. Is it related to your case by any chance?
Thanks!

[frankive]

Hi!
We are not using Veeam One in this environment.
It is a full copy, no other restore points.
Should I create a case and do a remote session? SSD should relaly kick off this small surebackup

[foggy]

How about other activities involving the same host? Yes, letting our engineers to take a look at the entire setup could shed some light on the issue.