CPU usage on Linux destination

[helman]

Hello,

I'm just trialling the new Veeam5 in a little test setup. Host is a vSphere4.1 cluster and destination is a little linux server (on Ubuntu 10.04).

When backing up to this linux server Veeam spawns 5 processes that eat up 100% CPU altogether. It looks like the backup is pretty slow because of this. The Veeam VM that invokes the backup has plenty more CPU power - the backup destination doesn't have that much CPU, only much harddisk.

What are those processes actually doing on the destination server and can I shift some of that work onto the Veeam VM (where I can add plenty more vCPUs)? Backup is crawling and it looks like the CPU of my little NAS plays a heavy role in this...

[tsightler]

I would suggest that if your NAS has limited CPU you should write you backups to the NAS as a SMB/CIFS share rather than adding it as a linux client. Then all of the processing will take place at the Veeam server.

When you add a host as a Linux target, the Veeam server basically just becomes a vStorage API proxy (OK, it's a little more than that, but you get the idea), reading data from the ESX and sending that data to the linux target for compression and dedupe. If you simply write the data to shared network storage then the Veeam server does all the compression and dedupe.

[helman]

Thanks for the information.

Next question is a little related to that: Can I connect to a CIFS share with user defined credentials? The job-wizard never asks for username/password and the backup job subsequently fails.

So the only possibility would be that the Veeam-Service (or whichever process writes to the share) runs as the same domain user as the NAS share, right?

[tsightler]

Right, the Veeam Server account needs to have permissions on the NAS share. In our case we create a special service account for Veeam and simply add that account to the share.

[helman]

Right - thanks a lot!

Just a suggestion: The Linux-Server part (with the linux-server doing the hard work if accessed via SSH) is something that I would expect to be in the user guide. (if it is then I apologize for not finding it )