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adept1
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ExaGrid best practice

Post by adept1 »

I was reading the best practices for ExaGrid https://www.veeam.com/kb2056.

Is using "de-dupe friendly" compression setting still valid, or is "optimal" preferred? Also, should I be using "local target?"

The reason I ask, is because some time (perhaps years) ago I had changed these to "optimal" and "local target 16+TB" after reading something that I cannot find now. None of our backups are anywhere close to 16TB. The largest is probably about 2TB or less.

I've been running out of space on my ExaGrid, so I'm trying to tweak some things to buy time before I can install a new one.

Please only answer if you're familiar with ExaGrid specifically, as I understand that its settings are not the same as other de-dupe appliances.

Thanks!
Alex
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Re: ExaGrid best practice

Post by Andreas Neufert » 1 person likes this post

In general Exagrid is a dedup storage, but has a non deduped fast landing zone for fast restore for random Veeam workloads.

Block size... „local“ means 1MB block size which is optimal for the Exagrid engine.

At other dedup appliances „local 16TB“ is used to increase the sequential processing and read ahead cache hit rate at restore. It comes usually with a penalty at random read restores.
So for Exagrid „local“ is OK.
Please keep in mind that any change here will become only active when you perform an „active full“.

Veeam own dedup can be enabled and this is compatible with all dedup engines. It is usually not enabled for dedup engines as if you disable it Veeam changes metadata read pattern at restore which is better for dedup storage. Usually you do restores from the Exagrid landing zone which is not deduped, so it make sense to leave Veeam dedup enabled.

For compression you have 3 options.
Disabled (not recommended as more traffic as needed is processed over the network).

Optimal + Repository setting „uncompress...“

Or dedup friendly which is the recommended one for exagrid based on tests.
adept1
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Re: ExaGrid best practice

Post by adept1 »

Thanks. I have set back to recommended values and doing active fulls.
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Re: ExaGrid best practice

Post by jhoughes »

Exagrid will also have the recommendations of using the settings of "dedupe friendly" for compression and "local target" for storage optimization within their integration guide, which you can download from the Exagrid Grid Manager itself (located in the Help section).

You'll also see this in their reference architecture of a Veeam/Pure Storage/Exagrid environment, which they have located here: https://www.exagrid.com/wp-content/uplo ... ecture.pdf (settings on page 49)

Having been a long time Veeam & Exagrid customer before coming onboard to Veeam, I don't remember ever reading anything relating to using the 'Local target (16 TB + backup files)' storage optimization setting, at least not in regards to using that with Exagrid. If someone had written that up for some reason, it could have been long ago, as Exagrid has changed their documentation to recommend the same "local target" option at least since their Veeam v9 integration guide.
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