do dual Ethernet NICs improve backup/restore times?

[guitarfish]

Can dual Ethernet NICs be used to improve backup/restore times? I would need dual Ethernet on both the repository system as well as the Guest VM, right?

[Gostev]

NIC teaming can improve backup performance on 1Gb ethernet if your source and target storage are so fast that 1Gb Ethernet becomes a bottleneck.

You do need NICs on repository, but definitely don't need them in guest, as we do backup from the host.

Where else you need them depends on your production storage. If you have iSCSI SAN for your ESXi storage, then you just connect both proxy NICs with teaming enabled into the SAN farbic, and you are done. If your ESXi local storage, then the only processing mode available with physical backup proxy is Network (NBD), meaning you need dual NICs in both ESXi hosts (for management interface). I am not so sure if ESXi supports NIC teaming on the management interface though, may be someone else can comment on that.

[dellock6]

I am not so sure if ESXi supports NIC teaming on the management interface though, may be someone else can comment on that.

No it doesn't, as the management interface as the name implies was mainly designed for management. Multiple nics can be used for management but they only act as failover. Round robin on networks (iscsi or FC) can only be enabled for storage connections on ESXi.

[dacky7]

Hi,

Can you team NIC`s without issue in Veeam V8, although i`m not seeing a bottleneck as such on my backup host i`d like to ensure the host can run as quick as possible.

Cheers,

[foggy]

Peter, yes, you can use NIC teaming (you can also search for other existing threads on this), however whether it actually helps depends on the bottleneck stats your jobs currently report.

[lando_uk]

No it doesn't, as the management interface as the name implies was mainly designed for management. Multiple nics can be used for management but they only act as failover. Round robin on networks (iscsi or FC) can only be enabled for storage connections on ESXi.

You can team the management nics on ESXI, choose to load balance by IP Hash. This wont give you double the speed for NBD, but you could for example have proxy A talking down one nic and proxy B talking down another via the IP Hash load balancing, theoretically making your overall NBD backups complete quicker.

[szwicker]

Which is better in the case where the SAN, itself, has multiple interfaces in different VLANs?

A. Connect 1 nic to 1 VLAN and the 2nd nic to the 2nd vlan
B. Team them with 1 IP

I supposed this would be the server acting as a proxy.