MS software initiator

[damduq]

Hello everybody

I've read in the release notes that some MS iscsi software initiator may crash the backup process
The file also recommend to use native win2008 server initiator to solve this issue.

For testing, I've installed Veeam 4 on an XP VM (Esxi 4 host + vcenter).
am I forced to migrate to a win2008 server only for the initiator, or is there any equivalent
software initiator available for XP, win2003 or maybe win7 os (I currently only have Win2003 R2 available) ?

Thank's.

Damien

[Gostev]

Damien, there is an updated version available on Microsoft web-site. I may be mistaken, but it is possible that there are not just initiator but also some changes in the Windows OS, so Windows 2008 may be required. If you have to go with Windows XP, to be on the safe side, I recommend setting up Veeam Backup VM with the IDE virtual disks to prevent crash. And still update initiator (for better performance and bug fixes).

Also I think you will not get good performance on XP because some default networking settings are bad there too for iSCSI. So by all means Windows 2008 is recommended.

[damduq]

You mean that only the veam backup VM should be with IDE virtual disk, not all the VMs I want to backup ?

In fact I had bad perfs during backup (around 5-7 MBs/s). Maybe due to XP...

[Gostev]

Yes, Veeam Backup VM should be with IDE disk. But if you are not seeing crashes, you do not need to do anything else.

Windows 2008, and some iSCSI tweaks like jumbo frames - and you should get up to 40MB/s in SAN mode from within VM (first pass). At least this is the speed we saw in the DELL lab on Equallogic iSCSI SAN (I am not a storage guy, someone else from DELL was doing those magic iSCSI performance tweaks). Just give Veeam Backup VM 2-4 vCPU, otherwise this may be a bottleneck.