Decreased backup performance due to existing snapshots?

[pinkerton]

Hi,

we are currently implementing Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.2 in our vSphere 5 environment (waiting for the hotfix before moving to production). While testing with a particular virtual machine, I never got backup speeds above 25MB/s with using both Direct SAN access and Network Backup. Other virtual machines were backed up just fine (45MB/s network using GbE and >100MB/s using SAN).

After some testing it turned out that the affected VM had a snapshot in its configuration. After I removed the snapshot, backup speed improved to normal values like for other VMs - so the reason of the slow backup speed definitely had sometheing to do with the snapshot. I however cannot reproduce this behavior by creating a new snapshot - backup speed still remains fine.

The snapshot I deleted was prolly months old and pretty filled up (though I forgot to check this). Has anyone seen such a behavior before and is there an explanation for this? Or might this be somehow related to the current vSphere5/Veeam compatibility issues?

Thanks, Michael

[foggy]

Michael, existing snapshots do cause delays during snapshot removal process, which in its turn affects the overall VM processing rate. Thanks.