Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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caustic386
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How to handle defrag?

Post by caustic386 »

How is everybody handling defrag of their VMs? Our average WAN backup runs around 7 hours, but after a defrag pass the job jumped to 30 hours. This time is OK because everyone's gone for the holidays, but in our environment this won't really work out in the long term.

My initial thought is to allow in-line defrag (defrag as data is written), but save the aggressive passes for holiday weekends. Any other ideas are welcome?
Patje
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Re: How to handle defrag?

Post by Patje »

Hi Steve,

That would make sense, since a defrag changes a lot of blocks on the volume, these changes would get replicated.
In-line defrag would indeed reduce your replication time.
Even if you save the aggressive passes for holidays, it will take a lot of time to replicate.

You should also investigate if defrag is really necessary. for some SAN arrays, it's even advised not defrag. (netapp for instance)
Defragmentation could also lead to increased snapshots and I'm not sure if defragmentation will give a big additional performance increase.

just my 2 cents
Patrick
caustic386
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Re: How to handle defrag?

Post by caustic386 »

Unfortunately, we are not using shared storage - only DAS with scheduled replications. Thankfully we don't maintain any open snapshots, so that concern is alleviated but I still don't feel great about my backup strategy.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: How to handle defrag?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Here you go existing discussions on this matter, might be useful: http://forums.veeam.com/search.php?keyw ... ag+sdelete
caustic386
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Re: How to handle defrag?

Post by caustic386 »

Thanks - I had looked through those before posting, but ultimately I couldn't find a very good solution for our environment. I think, even with dedupe/compress, there's no escaping our 10Mb bottleneck on backups and we'll reluctantly head back to tape for offsite.
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