DD Boost not using IF Groups

[gollem]

Hi

On our new data domain I'm in the process of testing DD Boost.

The way I understand it:
on the data domain I setup a DD Boost volume, I assign interfaces to it , I setup veeam to talk to the management IP and the data domain should allocate an ip/interface for that job to talk to (no traffic over the management interface, all traffic should go over the IP's assigned to the IF group)

setup looks like so:
ip.1 DDmanagement interface
ip.2 interface-2
ip.3 interface-3
ip.4 interface-4
ip.5 interface-5

ip's 1 to 5 are in the IF group

based on the above I expect the proxy to communicate with one (or more) of those 4 IP's which are in the IF groups. However if I look at the various components (proxy directly, data domain interface stats or DD Boost active connections) I can see that its communicating with the management IP and all backup traffic is sent to the managment IP instead of the IF-group IP's.

even if I run multiple jobs at the same time, they still all sent their data over to the managment IP's leaving the IF interfaces unused.

In our previous data domain (not setup by myself but by a collegue who left), what I found that the previous admin has setup 4 dd boost repositories where he is using a IF group IP instead of the managment interface.

Am I right that the veeam proxies should be talking to the IF group IP's?

[PetrM]

Hi Erik,

As far as I understand you've added a single repository by IP or DNS, therefore Veeam uses this IP to communicate with the storage. Why do you expect that gateway server should interact with other interfaces? Perhaps, you could stick with the previous setup where IF group was used for separate repositories.

Thanks!

[Mildur]

IF Group is a feature from ddboost.
You connect to the management Ip, the data domain sends all ips from the if group to the ddboost client and the ddboost client is able to leverage all interface IPs.
But I dońt see any advantages here, if veeam only uses one Gateway Server to access the Datadomain.
IF Groups works best, if multiple ddboost clients needs to access a datadomain at the same time. Each client will connect to another interface in the if group.

It could work with the Veeam Agents directly accessing the Datadomain over ddboost. But i think it needs to be correctly implemented.

[foggy]

Should help in case you create several repositories on the same array.

[gollem]

Hi Erik,

As far as I understand you've added a single repository by IP or DNS, therefore Veeam uses this IP to communicate with the storage. Why do you expect that gateway server should interact with other interfaces? Perhaps, you could stick with the previous setup where IF group was used for separate repositories.

Thanks!

Cause that is the way how you can load balance on a data domain, the DD automatically chooses assigns a interface to a stream which is least busy, the idea there is that a network connection is never the bottleneck

IF Group is a feature from ddboost.
You connect to the management Ip, the data domain sends all ips from the if group to the ddboost client and the ddboost client is able to leverage all interface IPs.
But I dońt see any advantages here, if veeam only uses one Gateway Server to access the Datadomain.
IF Groups works best, if multiple ddboost clients needs to access a datadomain at the same time. Each client will connect to another interface in the if group.

It could work with the Veeam Agents directly accessing the Datadomain over ddboost. But i think it needs to be correctly implemented.

With multiple proxies I would expect that Veeam/DD select one of the available interfaces in the IF group, but it did only use the management interface, the benefit would be that network loads are spread across multiple interfaces and I would be able to run many more simultaneous streams. The other advantage is that the proxy does not need to sent full data to the data domain, hash calculation is done at the proxy end, so the data actually going into the DD is the changed data making full or synthetic backups a whole lot faster as it saves a lot of bandwidth to the DD

I found the resolution, when I setup the DD in veeam I selected the data domain management IP/DNS name in the connection setup, it will then only send data over the management IP, however if I use one of the IP's or DNS names of the IF Groups, it will load balance itself

[soncscy]

>With multiple proxies I would expect that Veeam/DD select one of the available interfaces in the IF group

Small correction -- backup applications __never__ get to choose which NIC gets used when it comes to any NIC bonding solution, IFGROUPS included.

https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/ ... u57272.pdf

pg 16:

"The Data Domain system load balances the connections coming in from multiple backup application hosts on all interfaces in the group. Load balancing is transparent to the backup application and is handled by the DD Boost software. Because IFGROUP works at the DD Boost software layer, it is seamless to the underlying network connectivity and supports physical and virtual interfaces. The data transfer is load-balanced based on the number of connections outstanding on the interfaces. Only connections for backup and restore jobs are load-balanced."

You need to ensure your mental model for NIC bonding of any type puts the responsibility for traffic flow where it belongs -- on the software that handles the NIC bonding. Clients never have an option in such operations as it would defeat the point of such a set up; a given client can't possibly know the workload of any other connected clients, so how could any given client know which path is the "right" one to use?

Anyways, glad you figured out to use the IFGROUP IP (which is required). Now just throw as many tasks at your DataDomain as your gateway can handle for maximum throughput!