Backup Speed?

[CTS-Tech]

We are using ESXi 5 and Veeam 6, backing up to a 1 TB external USB drive. We have a Windows 7 VM running Veeam to backup the other VMs. The External Drive supports USB 3.0, but I don't think there are drivers for Windows yet?

The realtime statistics say the bottleneck is the target. We are getting speeds of 8-9 MB/s. Is that average for a USB drive?

[dellock6]

Hi,
USB 3.0 is the channel that the device can use, but what about the hard disk inside the usb drive? That seems to be the "real" bottleneck.
You wrote Windows7 is a VM, so how did you connected the usb disk to the VM? Since is a usb 3.0 device I must supposed you used client-connected usb pass-through and not host mode (see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022290).
If you managed to connect via host, the disk is maybe running in usb 2.0 or 1.1 mode, and this could be the reason of the slowness.

[CTS-Tech]

Sorry for the confusion - we are using USB 2.0. The device is 3.0 but VMWare has not come out with a driver for Windows yet, so we can only use it as 2.0 in host mode. The hard disk inside the drive is a Seagate enterprise level drive 7200 rpm.

[dellock6]

to clear out some doubts, have you tested the disk on a physical Windows 7? My doubt is that the USB passthrough is not so fast as when used with physical machines,I usually used that for usb protection keys or for small stuff, never for heavy disk activities.
Also, in your design you have two problems:
- USB passthrough supports vmotion but if the VM or the host using the usb stops, mapping is lost and you have to do it again by hand
- I suppose the usb disk is a single disk unit, so you are putting your chances to restore data on a single disk without raid protection

[CTS-Tech]

We have this same setup deployed at several small businesses that can't afford a SAN etc. - but want to use ESXi and Veeam for image & file level backup.

Now that I look into the logs of other clients with the same setup, the initial backup runs 8-10 MB/s and the speed of the backups after that is 250-380 MB/s. We do Reverse Incremental to rotating USB drives.

[dellock6]

Backup speed of the incremental is not real, because thanks to CBT only changed blocks are saved. The only real speed value comes from a full backup.
The high number you see is an estimante, you can read it like the speed Veeam is crawling through the VM, it's going so fast because it's skipping most of the blocks