Number of Proxies for Hot-Add Mode

[d.artzen]

Hello together,
this is my first post here. English is not my first language, so I apologize for any mistakes.

Since VMWare still has speed issues with NBD Mode in vSphere 7 we are thinking about changing over to hot-add mode, but I am unsure about the number of necessary backup proxies for this. We currently have 3 ESXi hosts (HPE Synergy) which are managed with one Vcenter Server. Storage is a HPE Nimble attached to the ESXi Hosts via FC. The user guide says that the backup proxy has to be a VM on a host that has access to the storage. So far so clear, but would in our constellation one backup proxy on one of the hosts suffice, or do we have to deploy several proxies on the different hosts. We have 56 VMs on these 3 Hosts that are being backuped.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards
Daniel

[Andreas Neufert]

For HotAdd:
You can check your Proxy Task count in the Proxy configuration to get the number of Task Slots configured.
Best practices is to configure HotAdd proxies with roughly 6 Cores 12 GB RAM and a Task Slot setting of 6 there.
So let´s say you have 24 Task Slots configured on your physical server then it is best practices to run 4 proxies with the above configuration on 4 different hosts (spread the load).

It is always better to spread the load accross the hosts, to leverage existing spear resources during backup window (remember the Proxy ideling during non backup phases).
If Windows licensing is an issue check for our Linux Proxies.

But I would check as well the Backup from Storage Snapshot capabilities by adding the physical Proxy to the FC network and configure the Nimble for it.
No bigger change on the config needed there and you would benefit from the Storage SNapshot processing.

[d.artzen]

Hello Andreas,

thank you for your fast and helpful response. I checked our configuration and in the properties of the Vmware Backup Proxy (which currently is the physical Veeam Server itself) it says "Max concurrent tasks: 4". Is this the option you meant? If so we should be fine with just one proxy VM for hot-add and we could even raise this to 6, if we wanted. Correct?
We would most likely use a linux proxy for this, since we don't want to license a Windows only for that task if not strictly neccesary.

Best regards
Daniel

[Andreas Neufert]

Yes, this is correct.
For a rule of thumb, you need 1 task slot for 40VMs in a 8 hour backup window.
Increasing the number of task slots can help for faster processing. I would say set the task slot on the Repository to 8
and create 2 Proxies each with 4 Cores 8 GB RAM on 2 different hosts. This should give you significant performance benefit.

[d.artzen]

Thank you for your recommendations. Since we are currently waiting for new hardware for our Veeam Server we will most likely change our configuration when we install the new server. The current speed (especially on restore) on NBD Mode is really abysmal since we updated our Vcenter and ESXi to Version 7. So this will hopefully give us a performance boost.

[Andreas Neufert]

Good luck with the change. Please share here results. It is an interessting topic for the community.

[d.artzen]

Hello together,

just a quick feedback: I installed an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as a proxy and did a first test on our old server by restoring an old VM, which no longer exists (and isn't needed anymore) but we still had a backup of. The VM had two HDDs, the first 20 GB and the second 120GB (of which only 15,9 and 37,8 GB were really used). It took Veeam approximately 8 minutes to restore the VM, we had a speed of 170MB/s (for both HDDs together), which is far more than the 3-6MB/s we had with NBD. So a definitive improvement. I now installed the second proxy and changed the tasks on the backup repository as recommended.
It will be interesting to see, if the speed will increase even more with our new server, where the backups will be stored on internal drives. Currently we save to two QNAP-NAS which are attached to the Veeam Server via iSCSI.

The installation was really easy. Thanks again for the recommendations and I will give another feedback, when we've gotten our new hardware.

[Andreas Neufert]

Very good feedback. Thanks, this will help others.