Optimum Configuration question

[blackfox986]

Hi,

I have recently taken over responsibility for a virtualised environment with Veeam B&R v5 installed. I have had some training on the platform, but would like some tips on reconfiguring it in our environment to get better performance.

To summarise the environment:
3 ESX hosts
4 nodes of iSCSI storage 4TB each node NetworkRaid 10 (8TB available)
2 nodes of 8TB Fibre Channel storage, mirrored (8TB available)
1 veeam backup server (physical server 2Ghz quadcore with 4GB RAM)
around 150 VMs using around 12TB of storage.
Backing up to a NexSan SataBeast over iSCSI

At the moment there is one backup job that runs at 6pm each day to backup all the servers, this takes around 3 days to complete.

I need to get this down to less than 24 hours, so that we are getting all our VMs backed up before the job starts again.

We have an enterprise Veeam license so deploying more backup servers is an option. But they would have to be virtual.

For clarification we are using direct SAN access, and getting about 20mb/s.
Reverse Incremental backups are turned on, as is change block tracking.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated!

[foggy]

Robin, first you might consider dividing all your VMs into several groups and creating multiple backup jobs for them to run concurrently. Running 3-4 backup jobs in parallel will allow to fully saturate CPU resources on the server (make sure that CPU usage is not maxed out). Remember to group similar VMs in one job to get better dedupe rates.

Another option is to deploy more backup servers, as you just stated. This will allow you to have more jobs running at the same time thus optimizing your backup window.

Also be aware that forward incremental backup mode is usually faster than reversed incremental, because it produces 3 times less I/O operations on the target storage.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

For clarification we are using direct SAN access, and getting about 20mb/s.
Reverse Incremental backups are turned on, as is change block tracking.

20 mb/s is a way too low for Direct SAN backup mode. I would recommend troubleshooting source data retrieval speed first of all, if SAN configuration looks good then try to change destination to a local disk on the backup server to see if it makes any difference or not.

Here is a useful topic on basic steps that can help you: Veeam Backup & Fast SCP with a Dell MD3000i