anyone backing up vm's on csv's without hardware vss?

[mrt]

The user guide claims backing up vm's that reside on CSV's is not a good idea, I'm wondering if anyone is actually doing it. To license the hardware provider on an HP EVA is insanely expensive, and I wonder if it's really necessary for my numerous, but small, vm's on CSV's. Thanks

[jake1110]

Yes, we backup VM's that reside on CSVs. I'm surprised the manual says that though....after all, don't most Hyper-V clusters use CSV?

Once in awhile Veeam will have sporadic issues snapping a few VM's on our Dell Equallogic writer and resorts to using Microsoft CSV writer.

When this occurs, the backups are dirt slow compared to the hardware writer. Usually, we get about half the speed or less. Seems like every job we have has one VM that Veeam uses the software writer for instead. It's a little frustrating but nothing too terrible. If we were to backup 100+ VM's on a software writer, then we'd have major issues.

It will also depend on your bottlenecks though. If your storage device is slow, then it might not be that big of deal.

[collinp]

In some cases, I have found the Hyper-v VSS to be faster and more reliable than hardware VSS. A lot of times our Hardware VSS fails over to Software VSS with error messages like "storage rescan did not complete", etc. Also, when I use the Hardware VSS, it seems to take more time to coordinate with the Storage Array to perform the snapshot.

[mrt]

I'm surprised the manual says that though....after all, don't most Hyper-V clusters use CSV?

I should have been clearer in that first sentence and added "without hardware vss"
thanks for the info

[Amyd80]

I guess the recommendation about CSVs and software writers is from the WS2008R2 days, in WS2012 the software provider has really very few disadvantages, especially compared to the crappy hardware providers that some SAN manufacturers deign to inflict upon their users (Dell MD3260 users here).

We backup two ~ 25 TB CSVs in software mode right now, though we don't have many VMs on them, just a few, but a couple of those with 16 TB+ VHDXs attached. It actually works pretty well, but:

01) if you are using Windows Server 2012, be very, very careful about the CSV bug (best described here) which was fixed at first with a hotfix that had a bad memory leak, now somewhat more stably fixed with version 2, but still not perfect, Microsoft themselves say they have discovered other bugs creeping around the CSV backend, which supposedly will all be fixed in Version 3, due out sometime in May(be). You also need to disable ODX (even with V2 of the hotfix(, since having it enabled makes the existing bugs cause problems more often

02) the software provider does seem to have issues with VMs that are doing disk intensive stuff when backed up, we have a couple that sometimes fail in Veeam at first, and get backed up on second or third try, but this seems to be like I said strongly correlated with disk heavy stuff inside the VM itself

[jeddytier4]

I'm doing the same here, but my current cluster is 2008R2. Backups are really, really slow and we don't have the option of hardware VSS. Moving to 2012 later this year, waiting for the above bug to be fixed first. Am looking for backup applications and without hardware VSS, Veeam is basically requiring me to create separate jobs for all 100 of my and probably limiting them to once per day. Hyper-V support, especially scripting seems to be far behind VMWare. Things are looking up with the new versions, but still frustrating. That said, I still believe that Veeam is the best backup out there...

[Gostev]

Veeam is basically requiring me to create separate jobs for all 100 of my and probably limiting them to once per day.

Can you please clarify this part.

Hyper-V support, especially scripting seems to be far behind VMWare

And this as well.

[jeddytier4]

Clarification:

1.Running backup jobs without the hardware provider make the backups so slow 50 MB/s doesn't sound bad, but each of my VM's takes anywhere from 30-60(Incrementals are only slightly faster) minutes to backup. And if one of the backups is delayed for any reason, then all of the machines on that backup job are delayed. If I wanted to provide for poor timings, let's assume 1 hour per machine which with 120 VMs and only one being processed at a time... Takes way too long to support on a daily basis. If we assume best case scenario for all VMs of 30 minutes, it still isn't tenable to make 1 large backup job. Using the Veeam gui against a Hyper-V cluster does not even allow you to create a selection list of all machines running on a certain host, i.e. I can't select all machine running on Host1 for one job and all running on Host2 for another job. So if I'm going to have to manually split the jobs myself, I might as well create one for each VM(Dedupe doesn't really matter to me at this point, timely backups do).

2. So after deciding to create a job for each VM, I started looking at powershell scripting to create the jobs. I cannot find a working example of how to add a Hyper-V machine to a job. There are many examples of doing it for VMWare, that appears to work. This may be a limited example, I consider this to be essential. While documentation for the Powershell api has been difficult at best... (Get-Help is not really documentation) There seems to be a significant difference between what is possible for VMWare and Hyper-V.

[Gostev]

1. Are you essentially saying that multiple jobs and parallel processing help you to achieve better performance with Software VSS?

2. There are no differences between VMware and Hyper-V in terms of PowerShell syntax, so you can use examples both ways. Likewise, all functionality is available for both platforms, which is why I was confused by your "far behind" statement. Also, we do have PowerShell Reference Guide available under Resources tab on the product web page.

[veremin]

I've split the following conversation into the new discussion, since questions regarding PowerShell are unrelated to the initial question and should be asked/answered at specific subforum.

So, kindly see this topic.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.