Restore performance c r a w l i n g . . .

[jhoge123]

I've backed up a series of test VMs several months ago and now need to restore them, but the performance is awful. I'm barely getting 6mb/s. Checking the four food groups on my backup server, CPU is 1-2%, network is running at 2%, disk speed is normal and RAM is ample. There are no WAN issues since the esxi host is in the next room.

The host itself is under very light use (<5% on any important metric) and has gobs of free space on an internal RAID.

When I started out with Veeam 5 on this setup two years ago speed was very good. At some point it went from decent (ten, twenty minutes to restore a 10gb test vm) to totally crap. If I had to restore a real machine at this pace it would take decades.

Any tips on getting veeam back to acceptable perfomance?

[Gostev]

ESXi management interfaces are throttled, so restores directly to ESXi over the network are normally slow. For fast full VM restores, we recommend using hot add restores (via virtual backup proxy). Now, of course there is Instant VM Recovery too - for fastest possible entire VM restore.

[jhoge123]

I have set up the management network on it's own NIC just to avoid that situation. I haven't explicitly throttled it, and just checked in vSphere and don't see any throtting configured.

Why would a 1GB local ethernet connection barely manage 6mb/second? That is less than 1% of theoretical network capacity.

[Sethbartlett]

I would double check that all the NICs in between are also Gigabit. Also, 6MB/s is more than 1%. 1Gb = 128MBps tops. Try opening vSphere client from the Veeam box or proxy and try downloading or upload data to the datastore and see if your speeds are the same.

[Gostev]

I haven't explicitly throttled it, and just checked in vSphere and don't see any throtting configured.

It's not configurable, it's just how ESXi management interface is designed for whatever reason. As Seth already suggested, try uploading a file to a datastore using Datastore Browser in vSphere Client, and you will see the same terrible speed, but with Veeam out of the picture.

[dellock6]

I always had the feeling that management interface has to not interfere with more important kind of traffic going into the same connection, like to say vMotion or HA heartbeats, kind of it was configured with a lower priority...