ESXi 4 Replication Speed

[Luc]

Hey Guys,

I recently purchased VMWare Essentials/Veeam Essentials and have a fully licensed environment using ESXi 4 as our hypervisor software all controlled by vSphere server and a seperate server for the Veeam backup solution.
All of our servers use local storage (minimum of 2TB per server) for their datastores.
I setup some replication jobs to run last night and i woke up this morning to find they are still running. Average processing rate is at 1Mbps.
My question is are these the speeds i am supposed to see? From what I have read (and understood) speeds were supposed to be much higher for this sort of activity (so far its taken 10 hours to replicate 60GB)
Now having said that i'm not 100% on what transfer method i should be using. Currently the backups are setup to use the vStorage API with the transfer mode set as Network (as we do not use SANs)

Any tips or should I expect to see this going forward?

[Gostev]

You should be using vStorage API for best performance, Network option is your only choice due to the local storage and license level. Typical processing speed we were seeing on ESX4 is around 10MB/s for full backup, and around 100MB/s or more for incremental runs (depending on the amount of changes since the last pass).

Try to upload a file to the target ESXi datastore via VMware Infrastructure Client's datastore browser, and see what speed are you getting.

[Luc]

Hey Gostev,
Thanks for the tip. I'll wait till the backups are done and see what kind of speeds I get transferring box to box.

[Luc]

Gostev I have one more question - the VMs that I am copying currently all use Thin Provisioning and by themselves arnt even using 1GB of space each but when I ram Veeam it copied 60GB (the full size of the VM). I thought Veeam supported Thin Provisioning?

[Vitaliy S.]

Luc,

If we're talkinig about replication, then thin-provisioned disks are replicated as thick right now, however this known issue doesn't relate to backup jobs.

[Luc]

Ahhh alright.
Yea I am using Veeam for replication so that would explain it.
Thanks Vitaliy.

[mdornfeld]

Vitaliy,
Is it in the product roadmap to be able to replicate thick/thin disks to thin disk on the target in the future?

Thank you,
Matt

[Gostev]

Matt, yes this feature is a part of our next release. Thanks!