Backup Speed & Maintenance

[jcronin]

Hello,

I'm currently using Veeam with an NFS share over a 100MB pipe to back up most of my ESXi 4.1 hosts. I've decided against replication in favor of better performance (most of our VM's are Exchange servers with a high number of changes made while the replication was running). I'm looking for some tips or maybe someone with a smiliar situation that can share their experiences.

I'm concerned about how often I should be running a full back-up, and if these can effect the VM's the same way a running replication job can? My biggest concern is speed, has anyone found ideal settings for backing up their hosts over the wire? Ideally we'd like all the jobs to run/complete during the off hours as we're worried about other technicians shutting these VM's off during a back-up process.

During one test I had an exchange VM (75GB) take about 35 hours to complete a full backup via SAN/NBD at a little under 1mbps, I'm wondering if I'm missing a setting or have a bottleneck somewhere.

Thanks for any help or input!

[Gostev]

Hi - shutting the VM down during backup won't disrupt the backup process, so don't worry about that. As far as backup and replication over WAN, then v6 brings some great improvements (a few times faster) in this department. With beta code, we are backing up productions servers that we previously could not even think backing up to the remote location. So hopefully this will let you do what you are trying to do. Thanks.