Performance impact of meltdown on Veeam environments?

[aceit]

Hello,

being a backup system obviously an extreme I/O intensive environment, what are the expected performance hit of Meltdown patches (ie user/kernel isolation and TLB context switch perf) on a typical Veeam system?

What Veeam is seeing in its testing labs?

What you people are seeing in the field (post patch impact)?

thanks

[Gostev]

Hello,

Indeed it is a good idea to share impact numbers from real-world environments, so thanks for starting this thread!

Just wanted to note that there's also the official Veeam KB article that is supposed to have some performance impact information soon > KB2427

Thanks!

[mcz]

In our small environment (2 hosts, 10 VM's) I haven't observed any notable impact since installing the patches but I think it's also related to the fact that we're not having a lot of IO's.

[n0creativity]

This is a pretty significant concern for us. Our primary backup repo (and also Veeam server) is a HPE StoreEasy (just a DL380 G9). We run Server 2012R2 with dedupe on the primary repo volume. It currently takes MS dedupe, which I would assume is rather cpntext switch intensive, about 24 to 36 hours to run a full cycle and I have our backup jobs and retention tuned to make sure we have enough space at any given time.
If the patches cause a 25%-50% performance hit on the dedupe process, I will have to go through that whole 'tuning' process again. That's not something I'm looking forward to.

[aceit]

From the KB: "Preliminary tests in our lab haven't shown any significant performance degradation on Veeam components after applying the patches. However, the performance impact may be noticeable depending on the hardware configuration. "

Could you share any data on this? Generic high level configuration used in the lab (ie. I/O over FibreChannel, direct disks, iscsi, tape..etc..)?
It would be useful, thanks

[aceit]

Sorry to resurrect this topic, but at the end can you share what performance impact was measured in the field?

Meltdown/Spectre bug classes surely must take the price as the most rapidly shocking and rapidly forgotten vulns in history...