10Gb Configuration and Backup Speed Questions

[TotalDisarray]

I finally got all the hardware together and configured and ran a test backup and didn't see anywhere near the "wow" speeds I was expecting. Based on security policies, I'm a little restricted on what can be configured how in terms of physical and logical connectivity. Here's essentially what I have:


Virtual Windows 2008R2 Server on ESXi (5.5U2) 10Gb host also hosting Veeam proxy

• Two vNics, one on ESXi Management subnet, one on Backup Network subnet

Dual 10Gb nics in ESXi host

• Both nics in one vSwitch

• Multiple vKernels for each vlan for each traffic type

• Traffic types/vlans are: ESXI Management, vMotion, iSCSI, Production Network, Backup Network, each with it's own respective vlan

Vlans/Subnets:

• 10.10.10.X/24 - ESXi Management

• 172.16.X.X/24 - vMotion

• 172.24.X.X/24 - iSCSI

• 10.10.20.X/24 - Prod network

• 10.10.30.X/24 - Backup network

Not the real subnets, but that's essentially how they are segregated.

Exagrid EX13000

• 10Gb Nics on Backup network

• Configured in Veeam B&R console as a de-dupe appliance using Exagrid DataMover

SAN is a Equallogic PS6210X hybrid flash/10k with four active 10Gb paths

• Please don't point fingers at the SAN, I can do storage vMotions all daylong and see sustained 8Gbps so I can't see the SAN bottlenecking me down to 94MBs

Veeam proxy configured to use NBD mode

After my first test, I'm not seeing speeds any better than I did before when I was running solely on a 1Gb network. I'm not expecting to see anything near 10GB of course, but I figured I would see something better. Based on that setup, should I reconfigure or adjust something? I never seem to get a straight answer out of support (Veeam or Exagrid) on how I should connect/configure what. Fair enough, there's a lot of variables and possible hardware combinations so I know there isn't a 'one size fits all' solution out there.

The results from my first test were:
Processing rate: 94MBs
Bottleneck: Source - Bottleneck
Busy: Source 98% > Proxy 30% > Network 17% > Target 0%

When NBD goes through the hypervisor to access the storage, does it interact with vCenter in any way or is it straight from the B&R server to the ESXi host that the guest targeted for backup is running on?

I imagine tomorrow I'll start trying some different combinations of what works best where, but any suggestions or insight would be great. My largest single backup is 5TB, total full backups run around the 10TB range.

[Gostev]

NBD is straight from the host to backup proxy, but of course there is initial TGT interaction with vCenter taking place so that secure connection direct to the host can be established.

Your performance is indeed poor/unexpected, and I actually (based on Source bottleneck and speed) suspect that you have some piece of networking equipment failed over to 1Gb. Normally, you should be getting around around 400MB/s for NBD on 10Gb Ethernet. At least, this is what I saw other folks reporting (still have a Task Manager screenshot from one of them in one of my PowerPoints).