Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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cstemaly
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Is my environment set up right?

Post by cstemaly »

Environment:
Physical server with 4Gb FiberChannel HBA, a Fiber connection to an HP MSA20 with 6TB of storage, and a fiber connection to a HP MSL4048 Tape Library.
I've setup the backup proxy to be this physical server with Direct SAN access with 2 Max concurrent tasks.
My repository is the HP MSA20.
My VMware hosts are ESXi 4.1
I'm doing Reverse Incremental backups with Change Block Tracking enabled.

My first backup of 30 VMs, calculated at 4.4TB, wrote 2TB to disk in 24:21:15 at an average processing rate of 45MB/s.
My bottleneck report shows: Source 96%, Proxy 80%, Network 9%, and Target 6%

I'm reading this as my physical server is the problem.
I realize that this was my first backup job, so Veeam had to read everything, but I would have thought that the processing rate would be higher with Direct SAN access.
I'm having trouble understanding what the offline backup proxy is and whether it would speed things up. I have my Veeam ONE server as a VM, so I think I could make that the backup proxy if I could find some evidence that it would give me a speed boost.

Can anyone analyze this and tell me where I can improve my setup?
Gostev
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Re: Is my environment set up right?

Post by Gostev »

The main problem seems to be source data retrieval speed - proxy seems to still have some head room. I would try playing around SAN connectivity (updating drivers and firmware on HBA and switches, uninstalling MPIO and so on).

While experimenting, best is to drop the compression level on your test job to Low - to ensure proxy CPU is not a bottleneck.
cstemaly
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Re: Is my environment set up right?

Post by cstemaly » 1 person likes this post

I am getting speads of up to 250MB/s after updating the FC HBA drivers.

Great tip, thanks for bringing me back to the basics. Also: Duh, I can't believe I missed that! Now my bottleneck is my storage repository!
Gostev
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Re: Is my environment set up right?

Post by Gostev »

Reversed incremental backup mode does hit pretty hard on backup repository. Be sure to install 6.1 Patch 1, this has some enhancements in this area.
Or, if you are after fastest possible performance, and have plenty of disk space to store your backups, then just switch to regular incremental backup.
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