Tape Restore Performance

[mwieting]

Can I just get some numbers on how long its taking others to restore an entire VM from tape? Im usig LTO6 and it took over 8 hours to restore 40gb-sh VM. I mean, I know tape is slow but that seems really really slow. I could restore my entire VM from the cloud quicker.

[Dima P.]

Hello Matthew.

Can you please clarify how tape drive is connected to your infrastructure? Are you talking about direct VM from tape restore or you used staging repository? Thanks.

[William Bohn]

What is the expected times for a 100gb VM restore from tape? I just kicked off a full restore back to production and after 25 mins it still says 0% progress.
It seems that Processing the VM and Building the restore metadata cache is running but I couldn't be positive since the statistics tab doesn't show any values yet. Still 'estimating'

Please advise since I have a user that is expecting an ETA on this.

Update: Log tab status say Restoring vhdx file 400kb/s and then it starts to ramp up to 2MB/s. Is it suppose to ramp up much fast than this? Is 1-2 days the norm for one 100GB VM?

We are using a LTO7 drive.

thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello Bill,

Can you please clarify:

- What Veeam B&R version you are using?
- How tape drive is connected to your backup server? Tape server component is installed on the Veeam B&R machine or that is a remote installation?
- Are you referring to direct VM restore from tape to infrastructure or your are restoring via staging repository?

Thank you in advance!

[Didi7]

@William Bohn

I can tell you that restore rates are absolutely abnormal. We use a lot of HPE LTO7 drives, both as single tape drives and in tape libraries and speed should be around 300MB/s theoratically. I remember constant restore rates of around 120-150MB/s on LTO6 drives and around 250-300MB/s on LTO7 drives.

You can do your own math to find out how long that would take to restore a 100GB *.vbk oder *.vib file.

Make sure that you have the latest firmware on your LTO7-drive and that you install the latest tape drivers from the tape drive vendor. If it's an HPE LTO7-drive, the latest driver package to date is v4.4.0.0 and make sure you don't have any other backup software other than Veeam B&R on that server. The tape driver version is displayed in device manager.

Veeam B&R uses the tape drivers from the tape drive vendor, other backup software like e.g. Veritas prior came with their own tape drivers and replaced the vendor tape drivers. If I am not mistaken this has changed since Backup Exec version 2012 or 2014, I am not sure at the moment.

Should you have replaced other backup software with Veeam B&R and you did not remove the backup software or the tape drivers the backup software included, then you should check the tape drives in device manager. Otherwise if Veeam B&R was freshly installed without any other prior backup software, then please make sure you use the latest tape driver from the vendor and the latest firmware for the tape drive, as mentioned above.

And please make sure you have the latest patches for your Hyper-V server installed too, if Veeam B&R is installed on the same server.

Please name the exact OS version and Windows Update status, as well as the exact version and update status of Veeam B&R you use and the way your LTO7 drive is connected to your server or your Veeam Tape server, if this one is installed on a different machine.

Regards,
Didi7

[William Bohn]

Thank you for the replies. We are glad that any empty blocks on a VM are skipped so our 100GB VM only needed 23GB written to finish but it still took 1 1/2 hours. If it was an older VM that might of took 3 times the amount of time.

-B&R Version is the latest available.
-Tape Drive (Quantum Ultrium-HH7) is connected to the same physical server that is home to the Veeam installation.
-This was a direct restore to production which is a different storage array. (How can we go back and see where the bottleneck was?)

I'll check to see if we have the latest drivers for the tape machine. It is showing 8/25/2017 so there may be a newer one.
We do seem to keep our Hyper-V hosts patched up, and I do see that our Veeam server has been rebooted for Windows updates recently as well.

Should we not restore directly to production infrastructure and rather only restore to staging and then copy the hyper-v disk over and do all the steps to bring that up? That usually isn't much work with VMWare but with Hyper-V I wonder if there are a few gotchas to watch out for in doing the copy and replace.

thanks again for any insight. Would hate to have to restore one of our larger VMs at this pace.

-Bill

[Didi7]

thanks again for any insight. Would hate to have to restore one of our larger VMs at this pace.

You would have my deepest sympathy!