General performance advice

[mythumbsclick]

Hi
I am hoping I can get some input on my current setup and what I can do to improve backup performance based on your own experiences.

I have 2 Dell R720xd hosts loaded up with around 10 VMs each. Each host has Nearline SAS HD’s in a RAID 10. On one of those hosts I have a veeam vm with 2012r2 spec’d out with 12GB RAM and 2 sockets and 2 cores.

My primary backup repository is a Synology DS1513+ (currently in a RAID 5 with WD reds – I know RAID 5…….) 1Gig NIC and 2 GB of RAM. I have created an iSCSI LUN and attached this to the veeam windows vm via iscsi initiator. Network is over 1Gbps netgear switches. Backup jobs are running in reverse incremental and typically have 30 restore points set. Exchange backup has a typical daily incremental size of 7GB and takes around 2 hrs 30 mins. Docs server around 3-5GB and 1hr.

Looking at stats for the jobs I am getting:
Load: Source 5%, Proxy 19%, Network 16% and Target 99%
Primary Bottleneck: Target
Processing rate is around 3MB/s

I have backup copy jobs running over MPLS to another 2012r2 box (physical this time) attached to another DS1513+ in the same way as above with same NAS specs. Link between offices is 30Mbps. Backups takes roughly the same amount of time.

Firstly would you suggest taking everything into account that a restore point of 7GB taking over 2hrs 30 is a long time? I realise RAID 10 will have better performance but want to make sure that is definitely going to help with the backups.

Secondly, am I accessing the NAS in the quickest/best way (iscsi/lun)?

After reading some other posts I am also thinking about bringing one of our old servers (PowerEdge 2950) back to life and using this as a physical Windows datastore for the backups with local storage. Would this be recommended over the Synology NAS? In that scenario would Veeam stay as a VM accessing the physical 2950 as a repository or would Veeam be better installed directly onto the physical server?

Many thanks in advance

[PTide]

Hi mythumbsclick,

Based on your numbers we can calculate that the backup speed is somewhere around 0.77 MB per second which is pretty slow.

Lets start with target:

you've mentioned that your repository has 1Gig NIC. Correct me if I'm wrong - Synology DS1513+ has total of 4 LAN ports with a lank aggregation option, am I right? If so, then I'd try to use all four ports in a link aggragation mode to check if that will make the backup perform faster. Theoretically, your 1Gb link should have provided you with at least 80-100MB/second rate, but I'd double check if it's a network what makes your backup process so slow.

Secondly, try to run active full backup + forward incremental to see if anything changes. You should know that reverse incrementals are roughly three-four times heavier on IOPs than froward incrementals + RAID 5 here with all those parity bits.

P.S. By the way, do you have any jobs running concurrently with these two?

Thank you.

[mythumbsclick]

Thanks PTide. I switched to forward incremental and its made a really big improvement! Processing rate is now 30MB +. the bottleneck is now source which I fully expect to be the IOPS in the hosts.

[PTide]

Glad to hear that!

Thank you for the feedback.