general veeam perfomance setup

[phillbl]

hi,
this is not so much an issue i have but looking for a discussion on setup to maybe try and improve performance

my setup:
5 esxi 5.1 servers, hp blade, c7000, 10gb uplinks x 2 active active
1 Backup vlan on the shared uplink with 1 B&R, 5 proxy servers, 1 server with repository attached using iscsi (7200 disks raid6), HP EVA SAN FC & HP Left Hand San
jobs are setup for reverse inc
i have 2 other vlans, servers and management

i am using the virtual appliance mode so this uses the hot add. When i do backups from the server vlan the disks from the servers are mounted on the backup proxies and the data is backed up using the backup vlan, as the disk is hot added at the esx level then i would assume that no data is traversing the vlans??
After setting up a few jobs i was quite surprised that the bottleneck is the source running at around 40/50mb/s. strange thing is that i have seen some jobs go as high as 130/140mb/s. Also, the initial jobs seem so much quicker and the the following gobs seem to take much longer.

anyway, any comments appreciated.

Thanks

[dellock6]

Hi Phill,
initial job is for sure quicker since it's a full backup, so Veeam does not have to deal both with vSphere CBT (since it has to read all blocks) and in reversed incremental it only writes the new backup into the repository, while on the second run it has to use 3 times the I/O to create thre reversed itself.

About data traffic, is it correct there is no lan traffic in hotadd mode, at a point. The lefthand storage is an iscsi solution, so it uses ethernet connections. Hotadd mode allows to use the underlying storage connections already in place for ESXi servers, without adding additional traffic. The only traffic from storage to proxy is made via the ESXi server storage stack. But from the proxy to the repository there is some lan traffic, regardless the repository is virtual or physical, since at the end the final storage is a physical unit outside of the blade (if I understood correctly your design).

Having a backup vlan is a good solution to separate this traffic from proxies to reposotory, but remember vlan is making you share the same physical ethernet link with the other vlans. A possible solution is to leverage some QoS or traffic shaping technique into the C7000. If I'm not wrong, the have the ability to create virtual links and to assign them a certain amount of bandwidth.

Luca.