Backup recommendations

[roisingdc]

I am looking for help/recommendations regarding a backup set that I have inherited. I did open a support request but was informed that the tape window couldn't be reduced therefore they could not offer any suggestions so here goes.

The structure is as follows (if I need to provide more info let me know)

Veeam B&R on dedicated physical server, 2 x 9TB local storage repositories
2 2008 R2 Hyper V hosts (stand alone) with approx 30vms

Veeam Backup
7 backup to disk jobs (daily monday - friday) consisting of a mix of reverse incrementals and forward incrementals with 7 restore points to be kept on disk. (Forward incremnetals are set to do synthetic fulls weekly on a friday)
1 copy to tape job that copies both backup respositories to tape every night (approx 8TB)
(Full Backup schedule 'Specify full backup chedule for source backup jobs which use a backup mode without periodic full backups' is set to 'weekly' on selected days (mon, tue, wed, thurs, fri)

Current, backup to tape is taking approx 5 hours to complete. Then tape copy is taking approx 20 hours to complete and often longer and as a result failing at least twice per week out of its 5 attempted runs.
I am looking to achieve a backup window of less than 24 hours for everything. GFS retention if possible. Backup to tape has to happen daily as backups must be held offsite (compliance policy).

Has anyone any suggestions out there as to how to best configure my backups? I appreciate any suggestions

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community Roisin,

You can use parallel processing for multiple backup chains while backing up to tape. This option speeds up the processing but requires more tape media (and at least two tape drives in the library). Will that work for you?

[roisingdc]

Unfortunately we only have one drive...

[Dima P.]

Thanks! How the drive is connected with your repository? Any chance your repository is a Windows machine (so you can install tape server role) and you can directly attach tape drive to it?

[roisingdc]

Hi Dima,

Tape drive connected by scsi, on a windows machine yes and tape server role already installed on veeam...

Roisin

[Dima P.]

Roisin,

I bet with such setup you see Network as a bottleneck for your tape jobs. If possible - try the proposed setup (Tape server role on the repository with drive directly connected to the repository) and share the performance results. Cheers!

[roisingdc]

Hi Dima,

We see the Network around 22% and the target at usually 90% or more...
Not sure what you mean by 'drive directly connected to the reository) can you elaborate a little?


Cheers for advice so far
Roisin

[veremin]

Try to connect your tape device directly to the server that hosts repository role, assign tape server role to that machine and try re-run existing tape jobs and see whether it makes any difference performance-wise. Thanks!

[roisingdc]

Hi Guys,

It will be a few weeks before I am back on that site - will try that then and update.

Roisin