Appliance Mod: Proxy on VM neccessary?

[maximilianp]

Dear All, I am very happy with Veeam, but now unsure about my configuration
We have a Dell Storage with 2 Dell Servers connected to it. I have had a physical PC as Veeam Server connected with GB LAN to the ESXI Servers. Installed a veeam proxy on a virtual machine on the cluster. (Win 7 64 professional)

My thougt was, that the proxy hot adds the virtual disc of the host which i want to backup, processes the data and then moves it through the network interface of the VM to the LAN-conncected backup repository (in my case was this repository on the veeam server)

My first Veeam Server died about half a year ago and i build a new one. But it seems i forgot to add the virtual machine proxy in the configuration, and so all the backups (i have had a look in the history) where processed just by the standard proxy installed on the veeam server. it does hot add, the backups aren´t slower than before (when there would have been a difference, i would have found the missing proxy earlier)

i don´t understand:
I thougt that hot add is only possible with a proxy with direct access to the storage. In my case with the physical proxy without direct connection to the storage the only possible mode would be network transfer. But that should i see in the history an there´s nothing about network mode or something similar.

How can that be? Is my configuration wrong how i implemented the virtual machine proxy? Am i using network transport mode without knowing it?

Please give me a hint!

kind regards

[foggy]

Hello, as the first step, please open your job session log, select one of the VMs to the left and look for the record where the proxy server is being selected for data processing. You should see one of the transport mode tags right after the proxy server name: [nbd], [hotadd], [san].

[Vitaliy S.]

If you have a physical proxy server, then you should be able to process VMs either with direct SAN mode (shared storage is required) or network mode, hotadd is not possible with proxy server being a physical server.

[maximilianp]

Thank you for your answers!
After having look over the session log again, it is network mode. (sry, i dont know how i could overlook this)
There is a vm proxy, but veeam doesnt use it, i have everything on automatic, but it just uses the proxy from the physical server for nbd.
should i force the appliance mode?

[foggy]

You can try to select the proxy explicitly in the job settings, however, I'd check for hotadd limitations that might apply to your setup.

[skrause]

When you rebuilt your Veeam server, did you re-add the VM proxy server to the Veeam configuration?

[Vitaliy S.]

Steve, this should not be required. Only credentials to this proxy server should be typed in again.

[maximilianp]

Thank you for your help an tipps!

The vm which i use for testing has

a SCSI drive
Filesystem ist 5.6, Blocksize 1 MB
the vm proxy has access to the storage where the virtual disc is stored

When i disable the default proxy on the physical machine an just enable the VM proxy it fails with "error no proxy available"

Kind regards

[Vitaliy S.]

Can you right-click on that proxy name and click through the wizard of the proxy configuration? Do you see any errors there? Also can you try to re-enable it (disable and then enable again) in the backup console?

[maximilianp]

Hi Vitaly!
Sorry for answering so late!
I have updated the proxy by clicking through the wizard. Veeam showed no errors in the config.

I think, i will start right from scratch with a new proxy. I will post here if i have suceeded or failed!

Thank you very much!

Kind regards

[Vitaliy S.]

You should be able to re-install a proxy role on the existing server and then follow foggy's advice to run your backup jobs in hotadd mode. Thanks!

[maximilianp]

Just a little update to this problem: I found another post, that the proxy is not working, when its a 32 bit version. I set up 64 bit Windows 7 proxy and it worked straight away. But it seems that the network mode is faster for my server config.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for updating the topic!
In some cases indeed network mode can sow better performance than Hot-Add.
What is the bottleneck stats for that job? Could you provide RAM capacity of the proxy server used for network mode and VM proxy one?

[maximilianp]

Sorry again for my late answer! The bottleneck seems to be the Proxy. I will Upgrade the virtual Hardware and will have an eye on the impact.

Gesendet von meinem D6603 mit Tapatalk

[Shestakov]

Having proxy as a bottleneck the best you can do is add more memory to it. How much does it have now?
Thanks!

[foggy]

Actually, proxy servers are more dependent on CPU rather than memory. CPU resources are utilized during on-the-fly deduplication and compression and the percent busy number for proxy component in bottleneck stats shows right the proxy CPU load. So provided the amount of memory meets the proxy server system requirements, think of increasing the amount of CPU cores on it.