Network vs Virtual Appliance Mode?

[bunger]

I have a new install of ESX 4 ( two servers ) and Veeam v4.1.1.

I have been testing the different VMware vStorage API backup modes to compare performance ( am backing up VM from one ESX box to the other ) and have found that both are performing close to the same with performance about 30 MB/s.

Should one of these two methods be producing significantly faster results?

thanks in advance,
Bill

[Gostev]

Yes, generally I would expect Virtual Appliance mode to produce faster results, but this depends on way too many things. Most common
bottlenecks preventing Virtual Appliance mode to work faster include insufficient CPU power on the backup server, production storage type, source data retrieval speed, backup storage speed, LAN speed and load.

[bunger]

I literally ran one backup mode vs. the other within 2 minutes of the first mode type completing. Thanks for the info, though!

[Gostev]

Let me try to paraphrase. You have a bottleneck in one of the above mentioned components that limits throughtput to 30MB/s during full backup. At such speed, it is expected that you won't see any difference between different processing modes (network vs. virtual appliance). If you would not have the bottneck (imagine ideal environment), Virtual Appliance mode would work faster, because in this mode, the data is retrieved directly from production storage over ESX storage I/O stack (very fast), versus going through ESX network I/O stack and service console as in the network mode.

[bunger]

Gotcha... makes total sense and I appreciate the info!!