Dell Rapid CIFS

[stevil]

I've been playing with a couple of new Dell DR4300 NAS's as backup a repository. We're running backups over 1Gb at the moment so I thought I'd try the rapid CIFS driver that dell provide to do source side dedupe/compression to speed things up. The result was pretty impressive with effective throughput going from 1Gb to over 7Gb. This is all well and good but at the same time Dell don't officially approve the use of the driver with Veeam, and I have noticed some odd stalls in the backup job which at the moment I'm blaming on this driver. It's going to be hard not to use the driver given the massive impact it has on reducing our backup times.
Have any of you guys have a go with the rapid CIFS driver? Any comments?

[stevil]

For those interested. Speaking to Dell, they've seen the same issues, hence why the driver isn't certified to use with Veeam. They are working with Veeam on this (where the proxy stalls and needs the driver reloading). No word on priority or ETA. It seems like an awesome addition if it can be productionised.

[enoch]

Be aware that we dropped using the Dell Rapid CIFS driver because it was not supported by Dell and we got disk corruptions using it together with Veeam!

[stevil]

Did the backup jobs themselves become corrupt?
I've reduced our two proxies down to 4 threads each, this seems to have fixed the issue we were previously seeing. Apparently each CIFS container on the NAS can only handle 16 threads anyway. Previously I had 2 x 12 threads firing at it, so this may have made things worse. I've done a couple of test restores from the data, it seems OK so far.
What environment were you testing it in? 1Gb/10Gb? How many threads/proxies?

Thanks for your feedback. Interesting to hear someone else has been down this road

[enoch]

It was back with Veeam 8.0 and with 2xDR4100

We only used them for Backup Copy jobs, but as I wrote we got disk corruptions when using the Rapid CIFS driver.

It was on 10 Gb network.

[stevil]

I notice that Dell have released a new version of firmware and driver for the DR series (V4). I'm in the process of upgrading the NAS's and the driver. I'll test it again over the coming days and see if it's still 'broken' with veeam.

[Rick_M]

If you're going down this path - ensure Veeam is the only thing writing to the DR Device. We encountered the below errors causing Veeam job hangs when RDA connections were made to the DR Device at the same time from Netvault - It's worth noting Netvault didn't even need to write to the device for this to occur - having an active connection was enough (This added months to the troubleshooting process)

Error PrepStorageForWriteEx failed *.vib' at Veeam.Backup.AgentProvider.CBackupClient.PrepStorageForWriteEx(String storageFilename, Int32 kbBlockSize, Int32 blockAlignmentLogarithm) Error Exception of type 'Veeam.Backup.AgentProvider.AgentClosedException' was thrown. at Veeam.Backup.AgentProvider.CClientAgentProtocol.WaitUntilWorking(Int32 timeout) Error Failed to connect to agent's endpoint *. Host: ********.
Error No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it ************ (System.Net.Sockets.SocketException)

[btmaus]

Quest has released v4.0.0.3 of their firmware for these appliances, it now has Rapid CIFS support with Veeam 9.5.

[stevil]

That's great news. Shame I didn't see this months ago. I'll go on the hunt for it and give it a try. Thanks!

[stevil]

https://www.quest.com/community/b/en/po ... ompetitors

Adding this link in for anyone else who struggled to find it.....

[jerseyconnect]

stevil let us know how it goes this time around.

We have a DR4100 as our remote repository and tired RapidCFS this September with our backup copy job. It ran great for 2 weeks with throughput improved 2.5x, but then the Veeam copy job would hang and just stop processing VMs. This was with only 6 threads from one proxy.

Our DR4100 is on v4.0.0.3 and Veaam is v9.5 U2.

[opg70]

I had the same experience when I tested RapidCIFS and a DR6000 - it ran well for a while then the copy job hung and basically wouldn't run properly until I removed the driver. No problems afterwards, all was back to normal.

[btmaus]

Anyone using the RapidCIFS driver successfully yet for a long period of time?

[davidwatts71]

We have recently upgraded our Quest DR6300 to firmware to 4.0.3. We are considering installing Rapid CIFS for Veeam. We would like to know if there are other users here that are using a similar configuration and what experience they have with using Rapid CIFS and Veeam backup 9.5 patch 2.

Thanks David

https://www.quest.com/community/b/en/po ... 0003676419

[jerseyconnect]

We tried it and didn't have great success. Others have had similar results. See this thread for some of the issues people have had, veeam-backup-replication-f2/dell-rapid-cifs-t37434.html.

[stevil]

It's taken me a while to get back to this, but I basically had a support call open with Quest (who own the DR series now) for a couple of months while they troubleshot a problem we had with the driver. Basically the driver would fall over randomly. Sometimes a few days would pass without issue, but it would always crash eventually, usually under heavy load.
To give them credit, Quest eventually rewrote the rdcifs driver file which seems to have done the trick. It's been running on 5 proxies without issue for about 6 weeks now. They tell me that the changes they made will be incorporated into the next driver release.
So, I'm now a happy customer, and have bought another 2x 36TB of expansion

[gosnells]

hi,

just seeking clarification.

Can you confirm that the Rapid CIFS driver you are now using successfully (touch wood) is newer that the latest available release on Quest's website
DR Series 4.0.3 Rapid CIFS Plugin for Windows
QuestRapidCIFS-4.0.3049.0.msi
dated 10/31/2017

Thanks in advance.

[Rick_M]

The driver you've listed is not the fixed one - you're looking for QuestRapidCIFS-4.0.3101.1 which i can confirm the issue is resolved with (8 DR Units here)

[gosnells]

Hi,
Cheers. I can see that they've now released firmware 4.0.3.1 along with the new RapidCIFS 4.0.3101.1 driver.
Looks like they released that on 4/4.

[stevil]

Correct, just noticed this myself now I've come to install some more proxies

https://support.quest.com/dr-series/dr4 ... w-releases