VEEAM Monitor high disk utilization

[AlexL]

Hi,

I've been observing something unexpected. The VEEAM Monitor VM (dedicated W2k3R2 SP2, 2 vCPU, 3GB memory, FC storage, SQL 2008R2 Express) is generating the most IOPS of all 250+ VM's in our environment.

This is measured by looking at Datastore Total I/O average over the past day. The numbers I see are about 250 IOPS, roughly 2/3 are read, about 1/3 are write IOPS.

Interestingly the write activity is fairly consistant over the last 7 days (~100 IOPS), during which the read IOPS are fairly low (less than 10). But last 2 or 3 days the read IOPS have been much higher, over 200 for hours at a time, during which time the write IOPS drop considerably to around 25.

I've been unable to pinpoint exactly which process is generation the disk io, the only processes with cpu activity are sqlserver.exe and veeamdcs.exe

If anyone could take a look in his or her environment and reports what number your seeing as to establish a baseline.

Any help in this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Alex

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Alex,

I would say the larger environment you have the more IOPs you would observe provided that everything is installed on the same machine. Our general recommendation is to separate SQL Server from Veeam Monitor installation for medium and large environments.

As for the baseline... I have standalone SQL Server that hosts vCenter Server (3 hosts/45 VMs), Monitor and Reporter databases. Write IOPs for this SQL Server are around 50 with spikes around 160, read IOPs are maxing out at 50 with an average number staying below 10-15 all the time.

If you're saying that IOPs number increased dramatically for the last days, I would recommend reaching our support team to review all application log files, might help.

Thanks!

[AlexL]

Could it be that SQL Express is generating more IOPS than SQL Standard? I'm playing with the idea of upgrading the SQL installation. I've taken a look at the processes with Process Explorer, unsurprisingly, the top 2 processes, by a 100:1 ratio or more with any other process are veeamdcs.exe and sqlserver.exe, with sqlserver.exe clearly on top.

[Vitaliy S.]

I doubt that the IOPs number can vary based on SQL Server edition, on the other hand, changing SQL Server for Veeam Monitor might be worth trying.

Anyway I would still recommend contacting our technical guys from the support team to verify your installation, as it might be something else that causes high resource usage by sqlserver.exe process.

[AlexL]

I'll monitor the situation for a week or so to collect more data and insight, if I'm unable to resolve it I'll open an incident in due time.
It's not causing a problem, it's just unexpected for a "simple" (no offence intended) monitoring product to generate more IOPS than applications and database servers with over a hundred users connection to it.
Regarding SQL Editions, I was thinking that perhaps the Standard version instead of the Express version is more efficient or something, I do not have the specific differences between the editions clearly in my mind.

One more question: we're using the free version for now, but does the database contain more than 7 days of data, so if we would purchase a license would we immediately see more or is data purged after 7 days?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, that's correct, all the data will be available immediately after applying full license key.