Balancing a scale-out file repository

[christiankelly]

I have a scale-out repository with 2 servers added. I want to add a third but I don’t anticipate adding many new jobs. But for IOPS and growth of current jobs I’d l want to spread data across all three. Is this possible?

Thanks,

[Gostev]

It will very quickly work out by itself, because the new extent will be given preference based on free disk space, while other extents will be quickly freeing up disk space according to your retention policy. Thus, all extents will quickly come to the same free space level, and thus will be used equally in terms of IOPS balancing.

[christiankelly]

The use case I have is repositories with "data locality" and jobs with forever incremental 30 days. When would a current job every switch to a new extent?

[Gostev]

In this case never, actually (because you want data locality and there is no periodic fulls - so there is no opportunity for us to switch the extents).

[dellock6]

One possibility is when you add new VMs, as the per vm chain of a new vm will be placed in the new extent

[christiankelly]

Is there any supported way to move some around manually and then rescan like we can with normal REPOs?

[dellock6]

Yes, you can manually move chains and let the periodic rescan task to synchronize the changes in the database.

[christiankelly]

Thanks for the info. If I do an "Active Full" will it also pick a new extent?

[Gostev]

Certainly (assuming it has the most free space of all other extents).

[ian0x0r]

Just to add to this, you can NOT move backup chains from a normal repo into one of the extents making up the SOBR without following the procedure below. The rescan operation will fail to find any new files. The procedure I received from support to make this work is as follows assuming that you have moved the backup chain already:

1. Remove extent from SOBR, it becomes simple repository
2. Rescan this repository: backup set is now under Backups - Disk (Imported) node
3. Re-add repository to SOBR, it becomes extent again
4. Backup set is still under Backups - Disk (Imported)
5. Map the job to backup set selecting Target repository - SOBR and then Map backup and click Finish
6. Backups disappear from Backups - Disk (Imported) and appear under Backups - Disk
7. Retry the job

I'm not sure if moving backups between extents that already make up the SOBR is different? Maybe one of the Veeam guys can answer that one.

Cheers,

Ian

[foggy]

Ian, you can move backups between extents inside SOBR just fine. They will be recognized during rescan operation, as Luca has stated above.

[crackocain]

Hello

Evacuated Backup feature is useful when all files have to migrate. But sometimes we need to balance the extents. For example we need to migrate only one big vbk file.

Also we might need to put critical vm's backup to high performance extent.

If all extents add same time and empty then yes SOBR balance works. But after when we add new extent only balance is painful, almost impossible.

Actually active full backup is not solve problem.

Thanks.