Fastest Backup

[rgs3]

Is it generally recommended to backup one VM at a time? Can I get a quicker backup by getting 2 or 3 streams or backups going at once? We are backing up to a MSA20 with 10TB array (which already seems kind of slow at 10-25MB processing rate) but didnt know if there was a hard and fast rule, or if its something to experiment with.

I'm already doing nightly backups AND replication at the same time, however their destinations are different - iSCSI SAN and windows file share.

Thanks in advance.
Richard

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Richard,

Yes, you may get a quicker speed by either running multiple jobs at the same time or having two backup servers running concurrent jobs. This will narrow down your backup window. As far as I know VMware recommends running no more than 8 simultaneous vStorage API jobs.

But I would avoid having many concurrent jobs hitting the same target storage, as this may lead to storage saturation issues.

You may also consider looking through an existing thread with the same question, might be useful:

http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... ame#p13419

Thank you!

[Gostev]

Ideally, you want to create the concurrent jobs in a way so that they do not hit the same production datastores (to prevent SCSI reservation conflicts, which really drop performance).

Typically the faster your source SAN is, the less parallel jobs you need to run. Customers with iSCSI SAN typically choose to run 3-4 jobs in parallel to be able to fully saturate source storage. With faster FC SAN, 2 concurrent jobs is usually enough to make average backup server a bottleneck, unless we are talking about dual-proc quad-core system.