backing up multiple vm's at the same time

[marvin]

I am currently going through an evaluation of the software. I cannot figure out how to get the software to backup more than one vm at a time.
Unfortunately, I'm in a limited test enviroment. I am running vb&r in a vm and backing up to either another vm or a very old physical server. This is mostly a proof of concept.

I've set up the backups with Storage API and storage with failover.

I can only get one vm to backup at at time and if I have to single thread everything i'll never get the backups in the window I have.

Any way I can do this?

[Gostev]

Hello Marvin, we do not support parallel processing within the same job.

If you want parallel backups, you should create and run multiple jobs in parallel. Ideally, you want to create the jobs in a way so that they do not hit the same production datastores (to prevent SCSI reservation conflicts, which really drop performance).

What is your backup window, and how much source data do you have to backup? With a single job and ESX4, you should be able to process up to 5TB of data in 8 hours with a single job (depending on your hardware and backup mode), although you may want to limit the job size to about 2TB of source data to keep backup file size reasonable (for easier handling). Incremental run for such job would take about 4 hours even on low-end iSCSI SAN for typical VMs (unless there are highly transactional systems with lots of disk changes, for example due to transaction logs).

If you have more than 10-20TB of VMs to backup (depending on your SAN performance and backup server hardware), I recommend deploying additional Veeam Backup servers. With parallel jobs, you will find Veeam Backup server resource becoming primary bottleneck, not allowing you to run more than 3-4 jobs in parallel on average hardware (especially CPU). Our Enteprise Manager component is specifically designed to provide single pain of glass for multiple backup servers, allowing you to scale Veeam Backup deployment pretty much indefinitely as your environment grows, while still meeting your backup window requirements.

[marvin]

I am testing on a a host in a test cluster. I can use vRanger (3.3) to backup this same host (about 500 mb) in 90 minutes. Now this is to a production quality server and not to what I'm working with. In all I have about 4 tb of data to backup and i only take 1 full backup a week (spread over 5 days). I was hoping to take advantage of dedup, replication, flr, etc as these features really aren't strong in vRanger and vRanger continually fails on us.

Any suggestions on how I might configure this would be helpful.

What can I do to improve this. I might be able to connect the server to the san where my destination storage is anyway, but I'm not seeing any configuration info in the manuals in how this works. I.e., what visibility into the vmfs datastores does the server need, etc.

[Gostev]

Marvin, yes - it would be best to connect your backup server into SAN fabric, and using vStorage API SAN job processing mode. This would be best possible configuration, as your backups activities will be completely offloaded to storage layer - not affecting hosts or network.

Veeam Backup server only requires read privileges on your production VMFS LUNs. Configuration steps are all the same as with VCB (if you have ever done this with VCB). If not, there is stickied FAQ thread in this forum that covers these steps of configuring direct SAN access.

There's no need to worry about scheduling full backups with Veeam, as we do synthetic backup (forever incremental with synthetic fulls).

Also, what ESX version do you have? If ESX4 and fast SAN, assuming we will see expected backup performance numbers on your hardware, you should be able to backup all your data with a single job - incremental runs should take under 8 hours. Although, as I said before it can be beneficial to split this into couple of jobs for smaller backup files and more granular control.

Let me know how your testing goes and what results do you see with direct SAN backups.

[marvin]

How do I get to the FAQ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Marvin,

It is stickied on top of Veeam Backup & Replication forum, here is the direct link:
[FAQ] Veeam Backup v4 : Frequently Asked Questions : Answers

Please refer to vStorage API SAN Mode section.

Thanks!

[albertwt]

i think by default vsphere max backup job is 8 VM at once from VMware configurations maximum doco.

[Gostev]

Albert, could you please share a link to the document?
It would be really useful for everyone.

[albertwt]

Code: Select all

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

here it is mate.