Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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mephisto
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Teaming NICs for backups

Post by mephisto »

Hi guys,

I was wondering if I could team NICs for hosts in ESXi so I can have more bandwidth for concurrent backups as 10GB network for this case would be outside the budget. Veeam would run as a VM on one of these hosts, so I would say perhaps have a VMXNET adapter on each VM giving 10GB and the virtual switch connected to 4 NICs.

Would I be able to backup several VMs at the same time using all the 4 NICs on the Veeam server considering the Veeam host and all hosts where the VMs are using 4 NICs?

Thanks!
PTide
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by PTide »

Hi,

Teaming of 4 NICs won't give you 4x throughput, however it will give you some redundancy and load balancing, i.e. four jobs might be running simultaneously via separate NICs.
Would I be able to backup several VMs at the same time using all the 4 NICs on the Veeam server considering the Veeam host and all hosts where the VMs are using 4 NICs?
In need to ask you some questions - where does your repo reside at and which machine serves as a proxy?

Thank you.
mephisto
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by mephisto »

Yes I understand it won't be link aggregation, but I was wondering if I get 4 VMs backed up simultaneously for example, and each host has the vSwitch connected to 4 pNICS, including the host where Veeam VM is installed I can then get 1GB per VM?

The repo will be installed in the same VM as Veeam and I plan to have proxies on the other hosts.

thanks!
PTide
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by PTide » 1 person likes this post

Then I suggest you to add all four pNICs of the ESXi host where your Veeam server resides at to the same vSwitch and configure NIC teaming. After that, create "Backup Network" on that vSwitch and add "Backup Network" vNIC to Veeam server. That will allow your Veeam repository to utilize all four pNICs. Next, since your proxies are going to be virtual that allows you to leverage hot-add mode, thus the traffic will go from proxy to backup repository via proxy-VM's vNIC, not via vKernel as it would in case of NBD mode. So yes, you can get 1Gb per VM on the repository side. Don't forget that proxies have to be in the same network with your Veeam server. Please note, that network throughput is not the only thing you should care about - please refer to requirements section.

Thank you.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Before upgrading your network configuration for better job performance rates, can you please tell us what is your current bottleneck statistics?
mephisto
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by mephisto »

PTide wrote:Then I suggest you to add all four pNICs of the ESXi host where your Veeam server resides at to the same vSwitch and configure NIC teaming. After that, create "Backup Network" on that vSwitch and add "Backup Network" vNIC to Veeam server. That will allow your Veeam repository to utilize all four pNICs. Next, since your proxies are going to be virtual that allows you to leverage hot-add mode, thus the traffic will go from proxy to backup repository via proxy-VM's vNIC, not via vKernel as it would in case of NBD mode. So yes, you can get 1Gb per VM on the repository side. Don't forget that proxies have to be in the same network with your Veeam server. Please note, that network throughput is not the only thing you should care about - please refer to requirements section.

Thank you.
Ok, I'll try that and see how it goes, thanks!
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by mephisto »

Vitaliy S. wrote:Before upgrading your network configuration for better job performance rates, can you please tell us what is your current bottleneck statistics?
I've not deployed Veeam yet, a we are proposing to the client to use Veeam, but I need to make sure the backup window is as short as possible. That is the reason for going with this.

I'm even thinking about making a 2 tier backup repository, one primary with consumer grade SSDs so it can be written very quickly, then a backup copy to a large RAID5 array of HDDs. What do you think?

My idea is to avoid the long time merging backups or simply then use reverse incremental straight away on SSDs, then the backup copy to longer term storage
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by PTide »

I'm even thinking about making a 2 tier backup repository, one primary with consumer grade SSDs so it can be written very quickly, then a backup copy to a large RAID5 array of HDDs. What do you think?
I believe that you won't be very happy to find out that it's the production storage what causes delays, not repository. I suggest you to deploy test Veeam server and check the bottlenecks statistics, as Vitaliy has already proposed.
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Re: Teaming NICs for backups

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Ok, got it!
mephisto wrote:I'm even thinking about making a 2 tier backup repository, one primary with consumer grade SSDs so it can be written very quickly, then a backup copy to a large RAID5 array of HDDs. What do you think?
This configuration looks good to me.
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