Optimization Advice for Small Deployment

[nosignal]

Hey All,

Sorry if this is too basic of a question, but I'm trying to find out if there's any optimizations some of you experts can recommend for my environment. When my company started using Veeam we were trying to get up and running quickly, so I'm just wondering if I overlooked anything that could help our backup performance. Our current performance isn't abysmal by any means, but the more I read up on the Veeam BP site, the more I wonder if I'm not using it in the most optimized way.

I've got 3 VMware VM hosts, all using a Nimble SAN (over iSCSI). Each host has a 1 Gig network adapter which is what ESXi's vmkernal network is using. They also have two 10 Gig adapters, which are for VM traffic, iSCSI, vMotion (each of those functions are separated by multiple VLANS).

I've also got a physical Windows server that is running B&R, Enterprise Manager, and Veeam One. The backup server's storage is on a Dell PowerVault array that is directly connected to the server via a 10 Gig link, using iSCSI (The array plugs directly into the server, not through a switch). Finally, the backup server has a 10 Gig link into my network, that's how it gets general network access, including how it talks to vCenter/ESXi to backup the VMs.

From what I'm reading in the documentation and BP sites, I'm almost certain I'm using NBD mode to backup my data. Further, I realize now that I'm probably bottlenecking by using vmkernal's 1 Gig link. I don't think I can' use Direct SAN access because I don't have an HBA or a free network adapter on my backup server to put on my SAN's network.

My next steps are probably going to be moving my vmkernal from the 1 Gig adapter over to the 10 Gig ones (which would be shared with my other traffic mentioned above).

What I'm having particular trouble understanding is if I should be adding a virtual proxy or not? Would that help any? Based on reading the documents/FAQs/BP I can't make sense of it it will or won't in my specific situation.

I'm also all ears for any other feedback. Should I be running EM or One on separate servers (a VM)?

[Regnor]

If you add virtual proxies to your environment, you would be able to run the backups over your 10GE network. While you could move your vmkernel to the 10GE network to achive the same, I would to go with virtual proxies; they'll be able to achieve better performance.
Depending on how your backup storage performs, you could deploy multiple proxies to distribute the load and increase the bandwidth.

In general it's recommended to separate VBR, EM and VONE on separate systems. But I comes down to your size and hardware, whether you'll be able to run them on the same hardware.

[nosignal]

Thanks that makes sense, I feel dumb for only realizing how that helps now, ha!

I was getting confused about how the proxy sections were talking about "hot adds", does the proxy do anything else that helps with performance or is it simply there to help it make use of a better path (in my case, out of my 10gig nics)?

[nosignal]

Quick update, holy cow, my backup time was just cut in half after adding the proxy! Thank you again for explaining that, I don't know why I had trouble gathering that same info from the documentation.

[Regnor]

Great to hear
I hotadd/virtual appliance mode, the backup proxy mounts the source disk directly as an additional disk. It can then read it at full storage speed and transfer only necessary blocks to your backup repository (with dedup/compression).