New ESX Patch ESX400-200912401-BG ?

[donikatz]

Does the new ESX 4.0 patch released yesterday have any impact on Veeam? And if so, only VCB or vStorage or network as well? How about the local storage over network issue (http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1211)?

ESX400-200912401-BG
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1016291

Listed among enhancements:
"Improves the performance of backup applications such as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) on ESX 4.0."

Thanks!

[Gostev]

They never mentioned anything about service console reads, and they did not refer to KB about it, so I assume it does not fix those. From the provide description it does not look like this would affect Veeam Backup or speed up backup significantly.

I would not rush with deploying it if you ask me, because the changes look quite major.

[donikatz]

Hah, don't worry, we never rush to patch VMW unless it resolves obvious existing issues.

Actually, I see Jason Maddox, CTO @ Vizioncore (@jmattox), tweeted:
"VMware released the patch to fix the read speeds in the COS for ESX 4 .(ESX400-200912001, ESX400-200912401-BG). With this update, vRanger and vReplicator for ESX 4 will get a 2x performance boost on data transfer."

So perhaps it does resolve the problem (and maybe more, since VMW specifies VCB). Can you please check back with engineering if they know anything about this from VMW? Thanks again!

[Gostev]

Hmm, actually I have open case with VMware for a few month now (critical), so I would expect to hear from SE if this is the case. But we will definitely test it.

As for 2x, I actually did test the beta version of this patch and improvement was pretty minor, only 1.5x (20MB/s > 35MB/s, still a few times slower than ESX 3.5 even with this patch applied). I am really hoping they have managed to improve this further since then, but in all cases, it is still significant improvement.

[alexr]

I have not tested it myself but this message http://communities.vmware.com/message/1452711#1452711 implies it has been fixed

[alexr]

I can confirm speed improvement of about 3 times. not quite back to ESX 3.5 levels but much better - about 48MB/s for new backup in network mode either VCB or API with no compression. Compression does not make any speed difference which tells me it is still server bound. Thinking back I probably can't really compare speed with 3.5 because it was doing de-dup (and compression?) server side