low restore performance

[fgw]

i'm still evaluating veeam backup.

my environment consists of six esxi servers running esxi3.5 u4 connected to a hp eva4400 fc san.

while running backups on a seperate physical server in vcb san mode i have seen up to 110MB/s within veeam backup console.

when i try to restore such a backup i can only achieve about 10 - 12 MB/s!

what am i doing wrong? is there a way to improve restore performance?

[Gostev]

Franz, you can get a few times faster restore by restoring to "full" ESX. With ESXi however, 10-12MB/s is the highest you can get... it is ESXi limitation, if you try to upload some files to ESXi using VMware Infrastructure Client datastore browser, you will observe the same speed.

[fgw]

Franz, you can get a few times faster restore by restoring to "full" ESX. With ESXi however, 10-12MB/s is the highest you can get... it is ESXi limitation, if you try to upload some files to ESXi using VMware Infrastructure Client datastore browser, you will observe the same speed.

thanks for your quick reply!

do you know if this limitation is intended by vmware or its just some sort of an unexpected feature which might get lifted in future versions of esxi?

if vmware plans to keep this limitation i might consider running one of my esx servers as full esx instead as esxi just to be used during restore of backups.

you know, usually there is no need to restore but when its needed restore time should be as low as possible as everybody is waiting beside for the system to come up again ...

[Gostev]

Well, this issue has been around since the very ESXi release, and is still not addressed in vSphere, so I assume it will remain. It affects a few other things except restore, for example, P2V conversion speed, so sounds pretty serious to me - yet not addressed in vSphere, which could possibly mean that it is simply impossible to address.

One thing I heard is that installing battery-backed cache on ESXi host improves VMFS write performance significantly.