how to monitor and throttle the replication bandwidth

[EVAL-IMP]

Hi,

I am currently evaluating the VEEAM Backup& Replication software as a candidate for our company's disaster recovery solution based on VMware vshpere 4 platform.
Does the Veeam software have a way to monitor and throttle the replication traffic across WAN? Thanks.

Regards, Terry

[Gostev]

Hello Terry, no - right now we don't have these features. Thank you.

[EVAL-IMP]

It is possible that this feature be added to the future release of VEEAM backup and replication software as I see a great value to enterprise network environments.

If you happen to know some workaround with third party tools or Microsoft tools that could help us control the replication traffic, can you please let me know? Thanks.

[Gostev]

Yes, it is quite possible that these features will be included - only depends on the amount of requests. So far, this has not been common request, so most likely other users are already addressing this somehow, using other tools or may be network hardware settings. Hopefully someone who is doing this today can comment?

One software tool I know which does this traffic monitoring and shaping is http://www.netlimiter.com/. Absolutely random tool pick, I just used it myself at home many years ago, during the "Slow Dialup Internet" age

[EVAL-IMP]

Thanks, it sounds a nice tool. I'll give it a shot.

Can you also help with the following questions? Thanks.
We plan to use "Vstorage API with network" mode to replicate VMs between ESX Vshpere 4 servers across WAN.
Q1, does the replication traffic come from the source ESX server to the VEEAM B&R server first and then go to the destination ESX server? Or the replication traffic goes directly from the source ESX server to the destination ESX server?
Q2, should we place the VEEAM B&R server near the source ESX server, or near the destination ESX server? in term of the performance and network impact.
Q3, we would like to take advantage of CBT in vshpere 4. I guess CBT is not applicable for RDM in physical mode. However, does the CBT work for RAW Disk Mapping in virtual mode?

[Gostev]

Q1: In any vStorage API mode the traffic goes from the source ESX server to the VEEAM B&R server first.
Q2: For vSphere: in case of ESX target, it does not matter. In case of ESXi target, it is better to place near destination host (to make VMDK rebuilding traffic not go over WAN between Veeam server and target ESXi).
Q3: Yes, starting Veeam Backup 4.1

[EVAL-IMP]

Thanks. Your answers definitely help.

Regards, Terry

[bshimkus]

I think it would be incredibly helpful to have throttling capabilities built into the product. At least in our environment, it is extremely difficult to get the network team to apply proper QoS or other rate-limiting so that replication traffic doesn't consume the entire WAN link to our alternate center.

[drbarker]

I think it would be incredibly helpful to have throttling capabilities built into the product. At least in our environment, it is extremely difficult to get the network team to apply proper QoS or other rate-limiting so that replication traffic doesn't consume the entire WAN link to our alternate center.

If you have the veeam backup server in vsphere, you can apply basic rate limiting inside a dvswitch (on a per-port basis).

[JLaaij]

Hi,

Are we using the right definitions?

Rate-limiting:
- Sets a certain limit on how many packets can be sent per second. Additional packets will be dropped.
- This will be a concern when doing (Veeam) backups.

Traffic shaping:
- Squeezes bandwidth, but does not drop packets.

Greetz Jaap

[drbarker]

Sorry, I meant traffic shapping




The dvswitch is only available in vsphere enterprise plus, but you can do crude traffic shapping on an entire vswitch too.

See http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/2009/05/ ... vswitches/ for more info on the difference between a vswitch & dvswitch.

[Michael]

For the record (just to get my vote counted) bandwidth throttling in Veeam would be an extremely useful feature.

[chamdor]

I would agree throttle support built-in would be nice to have in a future release

[richardlock]

I agree - bandwidth throttling would be a very useful feature to control replication to a DR site.

Another feauture we would like is to be able to backup VMs in a specific order to ensure that backups of certain VMs don't overlap with other processes.

Thanks, Richard

[aurorait]

Bandwidth Throttling would be a very great addition. We are currently backing up about 15 vm's and the incremantal backup files are 2GB's each. We are doing these every 3 hours so we would like to send the backup offsite immediately to ensure that it is offsite. However, if we run the copy throughout the day it will eat up all of the bandwidth.

[tfleener]

I too believe throttling is a must have feature. While you can use traffic shaping, I think it is on a per nic basis. If you have limited nics the traffic shaping is not ideal.

[Gostev]

Thanks for your feedback, we are certainly keeping this feature in mind for upcoming replication architecture enhancements.

[samrooney]

throttling would be very handy, we are at the moment trying to see if we can save money by dropping the speed of our connection down from 30mb to 20mb, we need to check if our replications still hit targets at 20. traffic shaping using a vswitch was mentioned earlier, i'll give this a try.

[st0623]

All, NetEx is a Veeam partner and our HyperIP product does time of day rate limiting on links from 256K to above OC-12, at very granular increments in between. We also do some compression and network latency/packet loss mitigation for replication traffic. Reach out to us and we'll allow a free 30 day eval to see if we can help.

http://www.netex.com

My email is steve.thompson@netex.com

[ctchang]

You can always get help from WAN optimization vendors like RiverBed of F5 Networks, they can reduced the replication bandwidth to 20-30 times less.

[rizks_2000]

[merged]

We run our Veeam backups and replicas across a 15Mbps WAN link. This speed WAN link works well for us.....when no one else is on the network. Is it possible to throttle Veeam down to say 5Mbps?

[J1mbo]

Another vote for the same, although presently I just dump this in the "best efforts" queue.

My take on it would be for some light-weight "veeam accelerator agent" VM, basically a linux distro needing say 256MB RAM and 1vCPU, to run on the source vSphere cluster, the B&R server at the remote site then talking to that a bit like a proxy - which could then easily open up the possibility of implementing both bandwidth throttling and compression?

[teksyc0m]

We would also like to see WAN bandwidth throttling in Veeam Backup and Replication.

[Gostev]

Thank you all for your feedback, I will make sure that you see this in the future releases. Cheers!

[J1mbo]

My take on it would be for some light-weight "veeam accelerator agent" VM, basically a linux distro needing say 256MB RAM and 1vCPU, to run on the source vSphere cluster, the B&R server at the remote site then talking to that a bit like a proxy - which could then easily open up the possibility of implementing both bandwidth throttling and compression?

Since I architected the v6 replication system it seems, just wondering where my cut is

[Gostev]

You could just join Veeam Teeam, which is what most of the active forum members seem to end up doing anyway, and then you will get your cut

[tfleener]

Although not the slickest solution, I have throttled Veeam by limiting the CPU in VMware (using appliance mode). I have done this if I am doing a backup/replication during the day.

[Vitaliy S.]

Very creative!

[Gostev]

Note for future readers, v6 has built-in traffic network throttling capability. The throttling rules are very flexible - the amount of throttling applied can be different depending on the time of the day if needed.

[SHSDavid]

Excellent news!

I'd probably use the feature to throttle down a WAN transfer during business hours, and then max the link out overnight if needed.
Keep up the good work guys, I LOVE this product