Performance Questions

[ec-inflxx]

Hi,
I am new to Veeam and running the trial. I am have a small/medium sized environment of about 30 VMs that will be backed up. We actually have 7 hosts because alot of these VMs are resource hogs. And we have a good amount of Dev and QA. So I have VM running as a VM with 4 vCPUs and 4GB of memory. For Backup storage we have a Dell MD1120 that is connected via a Perc 6/e card and is presented as local storage to the ESX host. I know this isn't ideal as that means the Veeam VM has to stay on that host but that is the best we can do for now. I have 2 drives configured for RAID 10 (as VMware has that 2TB limit). Everything is connected via GB ethernet. As a test, I did a 70GB VM and the first full backup took 25 minutes and the processing rate was 48mb /s. Is that a decent speed?

Here are my questions I am hoping someone can answer:
1. If the host that the Veeam Backup server is on can see all the shared iSCSI storage that we use in our production environment should I be using Direct Access SAN or Virtual Appliance for my selection and how can I get the fastest backups?
2. Where is my bottleneck going to be in my situation? I am guessing the storage might be with having it as local attached to the host but I could always connect it to a Windows 2008 server and make it an iSCSI target. But not sure if the performance will be worse or better?
3. Is there a way to check what type of backup was actually performed - meaning if I checked off Virtual Appliance is there anyway to verify it used that form of backup or resorted to Network mode?

Sorry for the long post. I just want to be sure I can optimize this environment and make sure I can get all the backups done in the window I am provided. As we are using Symantec now and the backups are taking forever.

Thanks in advance!!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Eric,

If the host that the Veeam Backup server is on can see all the shared iSCSI storage that we use in our production environment should I be using Direct Access SAN or Virtual Appliance for my selection and how can I get the fastest backups?

In order to use Direct SAN access you need to present LUNs to a backup server itself, at the same time zero configuration is required to use a Virtual Appliance mode. Both modes will have similar processing rates.

Where is my bottleneck going to be in my situation? I am guessing the storage might be with having it as local attached to the host but I could always connect it to a Windows 2008 server and make it an iSCSI target. But not sure if the performance will be worse or better?

First of all, I would pay attention to a CPU load on your backup server, though the most common bottleneck is target storage. You may want to use iSCSI initiator to present a NTFS LUN to a backup server and use it as a destination target for you backups.

Is there a way to check what type of backup was actually performed - meaning if I checked off Virtual Appliance is there anyway to verify it used that form of backup or resorted to Network mode?

Yes, this type of information can be found in the corresponding job log - Help|Support Information. Besides, I believe you should be able to see performance difference from session to session, which will indicate a failover.

By the way, have you been able to look through our F.A.Q. section? It contains tons of useful information, see the link below:
http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... 304#p20534

Hope it helps!

[Gostev]

Just wanted to chime in and add that version 5.0.1 will report in session result when automatic failover from Virtual Appliance to Network processing mode happens.

And answering your original question - yes, you are in fact getting decent and expected full backup speed for your configuration - but it might be possible to increase it further, just refer to FAQ topic Vitaly referenced above for some things to try tuning, we do not keep it secret - it's all there, stickied on top of this very forum

Thanks!