Best Practices for lightning fast backups?

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Are there any best practices or suggestions for speeding up your backups of a VMware environment? If you could configure proxies and job settings any way you wanted, what settings would get you the fastest backups?

[Shestakov]

Hello Jonathan,

There are a lot of thins you can do with a different cost. It depends on your environment and needs.

To have faster backup, it`s recommended to use Direct SAN transport mode for backup proxies. Obviously, better performance of proxies provides faster backups, you can also change compression/deduplication ratios to achieve better performance with a backup size trade-off.

Could you specify your concern? Thanks.

[foggy]

You should start from reviewing the bottleneck stats for your jobs, they will tell the weakest link in your entire backup processing chain. Addressing the bottleneck will allow to increase backup performance.

[Vitaliy S.]

Additionally, in order to give you more specific steps about Veeam B&R configuration we need to know what is your setup and available hardware/resources.

BTW, there is a pretty good whitepaper on our website that is worth reviewing > Best Practices for Deployment & Configuration (VMware)

[edfops]

This is hugely dependent on your site and your requirements.....but I have always found the best results with DirectSAN backups. Aside from that, throw as much compute ( 1 core = 1 task) as you can at it, and have the fastest drives money can buy on both your target and source. 10Gb+ connections seem like a no-brainer for "lightning fast", and quickly the bottleneck will veer back towards the storage.

For VMWare, there are some VMWare limitations on the number of active network connections against any particular host (I believe 7), so if using network mode more hosts will help. Veeam also includes a failsafe of 4 snapshots per datastore as a way to not overload your storage, but if you have fast enough disk and enough overhead for snapshot sizes increase this as high as your environment can handle, or build smaller datastores with fewer VMs each.

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Any particular job level settings you can think of that would speed up jobs?

For instance, turning off Application Aware processing seems to speed things up by a few minutes per VM.

[foggy]

For instance, turning off Application Aware processing seems to speed things up by a few minutes per VM.

But makes your backups not application-consistent... There are many job-level settings that can affect backup performance, we need to know what you're trying to improve. What are the bottleneck stats for your jobs?

[saintdle]

For most customers who are on iSCSI, I setup the Direct-SAN isci connection, which is basically, the Veeam Server being able to have Read access to the VMFS volumes on the Shared storage,

Below is the blog post I wrote about it:

http://www.educationalcentre.co.uk/how- ... the-speed/