Veeam Backup Design and Performance (HP P4000/P2000)

[vitaminc]

Hello,

i'm looking for some best practice with our backup environment.

- Veeam is running under VM (Windows 2008 x64 R2) with Version 6.x Enterprise
- vSphere 5.x on 3 x ESX hosts, approx 50 virtual machines.
- Storage for all our ESX hosts and VM is the HP P4000-ISCSI-SAN (fast SAS disks, 2 x 2Gbit Network)
- Backup-Storage in a different building is a HP P2000-ISCSI-SAN (SATA Disks, at the moment just 1Gbit Network)

My configuration:
On the Veeam Backup server i have made a connection to the P2000 with the Microsoft ISCSI Iniator and mapped the Volume to some letter.
Using Reverse Incremental. Changed block tracking is enabled. VMWare Tools Quiescence is disabled. Guest File System Indexing is enabled.

First Full-Backup Job of one VM with a size of 63GB.
Processing-Rate: 60mb/s
Bottleneck: Source
Duration: 7.45min
Data Processed: 27,2 GB
Data Read: 23,2 GB
Data Transfered: 8 GB
Load: Source 88%, Proxy 75%, Network 19%, Target: 26%

Second Job progress on the same VM:
Processing-Rate: 492mb/s
Bottleneck: Target
Duration: 2.22min
Data Processed: 68,3 GB
Data Read: 230 MB
Data Transfered: 51 MB
Load: Source 29%, Proxy 55%, Network 87%, Target: 98%

The question is, if i can stay with this setup or what can i do to improve it?
Is there any misconfiguration?

regards
Sascha

[foggy]

Sascha, what method of source data retrieval do you use? According to the full backup job stats, your source is a bottleneck. For Direct SAN access mode, there are some tips for improving backup speed with iSCSI SAN given in this FAQ section.

Regarding the incremental run, your target storage is a bottleneck. This can be explained either by the I/O heavy reversed incremental mode or may be your target storage controller settings are not optimally set.

Thanks.

[vitaminc]

Hello,

thank's for your analyse.

It should be the Virtual Appliance Mode. I Veeam 5.x i was able to choose the "source data retrieval" when i've created a backup job, but now in Version 6.x i cannot find this option anymore.

VCenter is added to the Veeam (which is running on a VM), and i backup the data through the ESXi from the P4000. Well, i could try to make a Direct SAN Connection with Microsoft Windows Initiator to the P4000, but i think i can live with the Virtual Appliance Mode very well.

Target Storage Controller. Well, the P2000 has 2 x ISCSI Controller with each 4 ports. Every port has 1Gbit. As far as i know there is no Teaming-Feature, so i only can use 1Gbit for the backup process, maybe with Multiple Paths and Round Robin i can improve the performance on the network if more than 1 job running to the same time. But it seems the network isn't a big bottleneck anyway.

Should i change from Reversed Incremental Mode to Incremental Mode?

regards
Sascha

[foggy]

In v6 these settings are proxy-specific and are set while configuring proxy server. As you haven't touched them, I guess the VA mode should be used as the default setting is set to automatic selection. You can check the mode used in the job realtime statistics selecting the processed VM to the left - the mode will be specified in the brackets right after the proxy name.

I wasn't referring to the network controller, but RAID controller. In fact, your backup performance is quite good. Switching to forward incremental mode will speed up the process, but consider the increased space requirements in this case.

[Gostev]

The question is, if i can stay with this setup or what can i do to improve it?

Your setup looks good to me... the only possible improvement is to get faster backup target, but of course this is not necessary if you are already fitting your backup windows fine. Backup target being a bottleneck is usually expected with the reversed incremental backup mode because of 3x I/O comparing to the regular incremental backup - this is the price you have to pay for low disk space usage (single full backup), and full backup file available after each incremental run.

Of course, alternatively switching to incremental backup mode would make your incremental runs much faster as well - at the cost of more disk space required due to multiple full backup file on disk. Or, if you enable transform option with the incremental backup mode, you will end up with both fast incremental backup and single full backups, but the price for this is very much longer backup time on the synthetic full day.

And don't worry about source being bottleneck during full backup. First, your full backup performance is quite decent already, and besides active full backup is too rare operation to worry about.

Thanks!

[vitaminc]

Thank's. After some more tests i've decided to leave the settings with Reverse Incremental and so one.
I'm quite satisfied with the performance.