Backup Speed

[flavor4real]

Hello,
I wanted to share something that was helpful in our environment. We run Veeam Backup 5 in a vSphere5 environment. I've had backup speeds (shown under Veeam5) up to 500Mb/s, which is very high. The last few month it dropped to ~55Mb/s and we couldn't really identify what the cause was for the drop. My Backup speed started to increase again last week, where my jobs display speeds are now between 300-500Mb/s. I've talked with the vSphere Admin and he said that he usually assigned the Veeam VM a amount of RAM where whenever Veeam needed it, it can grab it from the pool. This time he did something different, he actually dedicated the RAM to the Veeam VM. So instead of having Veeam go out and pull the RAM together, it now has it all right there ready to go.

I'm not sure what you think of it but my Veeam Backup environment seems to work way faster now; it's back to the previous backup transfer rate I had.

[dellock6]

Well, in Veeam 5 all the roles are installed in the same VM, so for sure that machine needs a fair amount of cpu and ram; how much depends on the size of your environments and the backups you run on it. Also, Veeam console but most of all the backend SQL server needs ram.
On Veeam 6, the central Veeam server needs some ram, but dedicated proxies for example are more cpu-hungry than ram. to be honest, I never reserved ram to the Veeam VM even in the biggest designs I made.
Why don't you upgrade to v6?

[flavor4real]

We are currently waiting for the Veeam6 approval. I've been waiting for it for a time

We always dedicated a good amount of RAM. Currently we have 10Gig but the application doesn't need that much during high peek times. Most likely we are going to drop 4GIG but we have to see. We just noticed that there was a dramatically speed degrease when the RAM was set as available instead of dedicating it to the VM itself.

This is very interesting. Thanks for your Input.

[dellock6]

Uhm, this sounds like a vSphere problem more than a Veeam one. Check with your vSphere admin, usually that behaviour is related to an excessive resource usage on the host where Veeam server is running, and you protect it by reserving the ram.

Luca.

[flavor4real]

Looks like it. We had a issue a few weeks ago and the Veeam VM crashed so we restored it and the vSphere Admin set a dedicated host only for the Veeam Vm aside. So, there is nothing else on the host beside the Veeam VM. The speed was still in the ~50Mb/s area after that. One week later, the RAM dedication/reservation changed and that's when I noticed a increase. I'm not complaining (lol) but Its very interesting and hard to understand.

Example (just got one of the Veeam Reports):
One of my Backup Jobs includes 9VM with a total size of 1.43TB, the processing rate was ~351Mb/s and it took ~59min to complete. This job took 4-5 hrs before.

[dellock6]

Uhm, that's really strange because if Veeam is the only VM on that host, there is no problem with resource contention with other VMs...can't think about other possible reasons...

Luca.

[lohelle]

Sounds like the vSphere admin had resource LIMITS set, and then changed it to reservations..

[dellock6]

Ah! that could be for sure a problem