Equallogic HIT Kit and Direct SAN Access

[ddockter]

My datastores are on an Equallogic PS6100 iSCSI SAN. I'm running vSphere 5.1on both my ESX hosts. I'm using a physical Windows 2008 R2 server as a Veeam proxy, and my Veeam backups are using Direct SAN access. I have 4 NICs on this server connected to my iSCSI network. Last week I decided I'd install the Equallogic HIT Kit on this server. Since doing so by backup times have more than doubled. Any idea why that might be?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Doug,

Can you please confirm that all VMs are still backed up with Direct SAN mode? Do you see the corresponding [SAN] tag in the job session details?

Thanks!

[ddockter]

I have confirmed that to be the case.

2013-06-14 18:01:25Queued for processing at 6/14/2013 6:01:25 PM
2013-06-14 18:01:26Required backup infrastructure resources have been assigned
2013-06-14 18:01:28VM processing started at 6/14/2013 6:01:27 PM
2013-06-14 18:01:28VM size: 208.0 GB (178.5 GB used)
2013-06-14 18:01:28Using source proxy veeam-proxy [san]

[Vitaliy S.]

And what about bottleneck stats? Did these numbers change after you installed the EQL Kit Hit?

[ddockter]

Below are the times for two VMs. The 6/14-15 are the backups that doubled in time from the 6/7 backups.

2013-06-07 18:55:29Busy: Source 95% > Proxy 11% > Network 28% > Target 75%
2013-06-14 20:24:34Busy: Source 97% > Proxy 7% > Network 13% > Target 24%

2013-06-07 20:37:16Busy: Source 83% > Proxy 21% > Network 52% > Target 89%
2013-06-15 00:55:18Busy: Source 94% > Proxy 6% > Network 14% > Target 25%

[yizhar]

Hi.

Did you enable/reconfigure some EQL snapshot after or during the HITKIT install?

Yizhar

[yizhar]

Hi.

Maybe I misunderstood...
Did you install the HIT KIT for Windows on the backup server, or the VMware integration HIT KIT (virtual appliance)?

If it is the first one - problems might be related to :
NIC driver on Windows server.
MPIO driver on Windows server - try reverting to MS MPIO and check the results.

Also try to open case with Dell storage support team.

Yizhar

[ddockter]

I installed the HIT Kit for Windows on my Veeam proxy. I excluded the NICs connected to my iSCSI network from the Equallogic MPIO and my backup times are back to "normal". I do have a support case open with Dell. Thanks for being willing to respond to my post. I was hoping maybe someone else had already gone down this road and found a solution. If Dell is able to resolve it, I'll be sure to post the solution here.

[Vitaliy S.]

Seems like it is a "well-known" behavior for Equallogic MPIO, see this thread for more details: Dell EqualLogic w/Veeam Config/Optimization