Huge Speed Improvement v5 to v6.1?

[AndyR]

Hi all,

Not a problem but just a question. I recently upgraded from Veeam version 5 which i've run for a long time now without issues, to Veeam 6.1. Everything went fine, but I've also noticed a massive improvement in backup times which is awesome. One of my jobs doing 31 VMs backs up a total 1.3Tb each night with actual data changed averaging 15-20Gb a night. On version 5 this would take about 3-3.5hrs to backups but since going to version 6.1 its shrunk down to about an hour! Was just wondering what you guys did to get these sorts of speed improvements?

Thanks,

Andy

[Gostev]

Hi Andy, what is your backup target, and processing mode for backup jobs? Thanks.

[AndyR]

Hi Gostev.

I'm backing up to an iSCSI volume presented as a local drive to the Veeam VM. Have given it a vmnic on the same network as the SAN so it should have direct access. Processing mode is reversed incremental with best compression and local target storage optimization, same as I was doing in v5.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

By processing mode I meant Direct SAN, virtual appliance or network. What is your production storage?

[AndyR]

I cant actually see the option in 6.1 to pick direct san/va/network? Must be missing something as it used to be on the 2nd page of the job config?

I originally had it set as Virtual Applicance and my production storage is the same iSCSI san as I'm taking the backups too, I just have it as a separate LUN. Veeam is running as a VM on the same ESXi cluster as well.

[Gostev]

OK, so if your production storage is iSCSI SAN and you are using hot add, then the most of the gain is coming from this feature:

• Optimization of source data retrieval. The processing engine now accounts for production storage specifics when retrieving virtual disks of processed VMs. This yields up to a 4x increase in performance of a single job depending on production storage and its settings, connectivity and processing mode.

Just wanted to check if you are possibly backing up to remote target, in which case there are other improvements that speed up the performance quite dramatically.

You can see What's New documents for both 6.0 and 6.1 release on this page, in case you want to know what else you have been missing
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup/resources.html

[AndyR]

Thanks. Ah makes sense. In the past I used to see hot add errors saying not supported an failing over to network mode. Don't seem to be getting these now so guess that could be it