Backup of System Disk goes extremely slow using VCB SAN Mode

[mdornfeld]

I have recently added a file server to my VM environment. In order to achieve RPO's, the files themselves are actually robocopied to our backup disk on a an couple hour basis using the MIR function. This robocopy takes 15 minutes, as opposed to the multiple hours that a Veeam job would take to go through all the files.. I didn't come to complain about that, Gustov and Veeam are well aware of this and I'm counting on Gustov's word that it's fixed in Veeam 4.0 in combo with vSphere 4.0. I've already told management that I plan to go with Veeam 4.0 as soon as it comes out to fix this very issue.

Anyway, this leaves me just wanting to back up the OS drive, so I selected the System Drive only in the options and ran the job (VCB SAN Mode). The job was running at < 1 MB/s. Painfully slow compared to all of our other jobs. (I have other jobs on that same ESX server, set up the job the same way, on the same set of disk, that run upwords of 100 MB/s). I made the job into a Network backup and it started running at a reasonable 30-40 MB/s.

Anyone seen this before?

Thank you!
Matt

[Gostev]

Matt, yes this is known issue with disk exclusions when using VCB backup mode, and different from what we've been discussing on Veeam Backup 4.0 subject (fast incrementals).

What happens is VCB still pulls down whole VM to VCB proxy, but Veeam Backup picks up only required disks while dropping all other data. So in fact your system drive is pulled down really fast, however the job has to wait until VCB finishes pulling down all other unneeded VM disks (and this activity affects the job's performance counter, which is based on full processing time)... it is not possible to instruct VCB to pull only required disks since VM gets processed in the whole by VCB.

You are correct, switching to Network backup mode for all jobs where you are only backing up system drives helps since in this mode, only selected disks are getting processed.