Vb and large VMs?

[beckhamk]

I would like to hear from anyone using VB to backup large VMs. Such as large data drives 400+gb. Have you had any issues? How is performance etc. Any gotchas?

[tsightler]

We are just starting with our Veeam deployment (2 weeks) however we have about 5 VM's that are over 400+GB, including one that's about 1.5TB. So far there has been no real issue. Performance for those VM's seem to be no difference than any other VM. We are an iSCSI environment and our Veeam backup/VCB server is not really very impressive (an IBM HS21 blade from about 3 years ago -- dual core only). With best compression the initial backup of the 1.5TB VM took about 14 hours (about 30MB/sec) but incrementals are quite a bit better, taking between 6-7 hours and averaging around 65MB/sec. Those speeds won't knock your socks off or anything but I think they're pretty impressive when I think about the fact that the system is 8 miles away on the other end of a MetroE burstable gigabit link. I'm sure if you have faster storage located close to you could do quite a bit better but we're pretty happy with this performance.

[beckhamk]

Thanks for the info. How long does your 400GB vms take?

[tsightler]

In our environment backing up system with 400GB of actual used space takes 2-3 hours on average but can be faster or slower based on the other load on the storage array and the type of data. Now, a 400GB that's mostly empty, well, that can be MUCH faster.