Please share your first v4 impressions here :)

[Gostev]

Matt, thanks for this. We will have online help that covers all the options in the RTM build. I am surprised though with your scheduling comment, are you saying you cannot achieve your desired schedules using "periodic" option and that uber scheduling control were you can granularly specify allowed/restricted backup times for each weekday?

[mdornfeld]

Ah.. the uber scheduler I like the name.

Anyway, here is my difficulty:
My boss expects, and I have documented as such, that I run a backup @ 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm, 12am. It's an interesting conversation to have with him to explain that while I scheduled the job to run every 2 hours, I can't actually control when in that two hours it runs. To somewhat achieve this, I've had to go and permit all of 6am, deny all of 7am, permit all of 8am, deny all of 9am, etc...

This was really an issue when I couldn't get a job status, to see if it was running before writing to tape. But it's looking like that functionality will be included with the V4 release.

[dlove]

Ah.. the uber scheduler I like the name.

Anyway, here is my difficulty:
My boss expects, and I have documented as such, that I run a backup @ 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm, 12am. It's an interesting conversation to have with him to explain that while I scheduled the job to run every 2 hours, I can't actually control when in that two hours it runs. To somewhat achieve this, I've had to go and permit all of 6am, deny all of 7am, permit all of 8am, deny all of 9am, etc...

This was really an issue when I couldn't get a job status, to see if it was running before writing to tape. But it's looking like that functionality will be included with the V4 release.

That's a lot of backups! How much storage are you backing up and how can you make those times with only 2hrs between? Seems like array snapshots or cdp (if you are using one) in conjunction with Veeam seems like the way to go.

[mdornfeld]

How much storage are you backing up and how can you make those times with only 2hrs between?

Backup jobs run anywhere from 500 GB to 1.5 TB.
I plan to be able to make them with Change Block Tracking included in Veeam 4

We'll get into CDP in the future, but not quite there yet.

[lethallynx]

Well everything is running sweet for me!

The upgrade to version 4.0 worked a charm, created some new backup jobs and started them.

We are running Veeam on an old pentium D (dual core) server so had to drop the compression back to low, so the CPU wasn't at 100%.

CPU has been sitting about 50%-95% and currently 5/7 VM's have been processed.

I can't wait to do some testing and see how fast the incremental backups go with the block tracking.

[dadger]

I've just switched to Veeam from a competitors product (never to be mentioned again), as we were having to constantly babysit the backups, they'd take 23 hours to run so we only just fit them in each day. Additionally they'd fail without any reason and then work on the next run, we'd get errors which support told us could be safely ignored(!), and if we (god forbid) rebooted our VCB proxy we'd have to spend about a week getting everything working again.

So, we bought 3.1 and immediately the reliability problem was solved, although speed was still an issue. A week later and with the release of 4.0, we've just backed up our 800gb file server in 10 minutes.

I'm going to be singing this products name from the rooftops...at last I can get my evenings back.

If I have one small gripe its that I can't choose to keep my last 20 days backups and one backup from each month going back for the last year (or similar retention schemes), but now I'm being picky. I'm sure I can script this for now, and this can't get in the way of how pleased I am. We definitely made the right choice in jumping ship.

[TrevorBell]

hi...

I`m sure VB4 is compatible with older backups for sure i can verify this as i used previous version and im restoring a backup right now

[tjestr]

I've just updated 4 of our backup systems (each capable of 12TB of backups). Everything worked like a charm.
The vStorage API backup mode is fantastic! The feature I love most is the Enterprise Manager. Now it is possible to have a quick overview over the whole backup infrastructure.

@ Veeam: Thank you very much for this gorgeous release!

[joost1981]

Hello guys,

Yesterday I upgraded 3 of our backups servers. The first impression is fantastic!!

I was upgrading the servers from home, watching a soccer game. I actually tried to explain to my girlfriend what a marvelous product Veeam is. Unfortunately she didn't understand anything of it. When I told here that I was making an incremental backup with a speed of 2 GB/s she asked me if that was fast?

Thank you for your great work!! The central management console is a excellent add-on!

Joost.
The Netherlands.

[Gostev]

^^^ best comment so far

[Djeten]

Hi all,

It's a great improvement. Finaly we're going to be able to do our full enterprise backups through Veeam. With 3.0 the backup window was simply to big.

It's really true that it just works very fast now with the changed block tracking feature.

the only thing I was hoping to be included. And was not is a feature like the vmware retention policy that is present in the vmware data recovery module.
To keep older versions of a backup
f.ex. keep backup for the last:
7 days
4 weeks
3 months

Shame it isn't included. Maybe in one of the next versions. And native tape support.

Thanks,

Didier Boydens
Augustinus Hospital Veurne Belgium

[glemmestad]

OOoh ooh!! I second that!

Keeep daily backups for 7/14 days, weekly backups for 4 weeks, monthly backups for 12 months.
Can I? Can I ?!?!

PS: Upgraded the last of our three backup servers today. Did one on Wed., one on Thur. and one today. Yesterday, the total data speed peaked at 1.2GB/s. Who knows what tonight will bring...

PPS: I don't need native tape support, but I would love dual-homing the backup (ie. one local fast fibrechannel backup destination, but also mirroring ONLY the changed blocks over to a remote site). Can solve this with expensive hardware solutions, but I would like Veeam to handle it if possible.

[drbarker]

First impressions?

Output from a VM backup:
7 of 7 files processed

Total VM size: 1.02 TB
Processed size: 1.02 TB
Processing rate: 6 GB/s
Backup mode: SAN/NBD with changed block tracking
Start time: 10/30/2009 9:25:35 AM
End time: 10/30/2009 9:28:33 AM
Duration: 0:02:57

'nuff said

[Gostev]

Wow, we have new worldwide record here for VMware backup... previous was 5GB/s for 1TB VM during the BETA... grats!!!

[zed999]

First impressions?

Output from a VM backup:
7 of 7 files processed

Total VM size: 1.02 TB
Processed size: 1.02 TB
Processing rate: 6 GB/s
Backup mode: SAN/NBD with changed block tracking
Start time: 10/30/2009 9:25:35 AM
End time: 10/30/2009 9:28:33 AM
Duration: 0:02:57

'nuff said

yeah but was that after a working days worth of changes?

[drbarker]

yeah but was that after a working days worth of changes?

Yes..... but....

It's thin provisioned, they're not using all the space and it's not a very active box

[Gostev]

By the way, previous 5GB/s record was for flat 1TB disk and daily backup just fairly static file server.

[ritusr]

Keeep daily backups for 7/14 days, weekly backups for 4 weeks, monthly backups for 12 months.

PPS: I don't need native tape support, but I would love dual-homing the backup (ie. one local fast fibrechannel backup destination, but also mirroring ONLY the changed blocks over to a remote site). Can solve this with expensive hardware solutions, but I would like Veeam to handle it if possible.

I second both these suggestions for the next version!!

(Moving from testing successfully in my lab, to install VB4 in our production system this weekend.....)

JTS

[zed999]

5 of 5 files processed

Total VM size: 350.00 GB
Processed size: 350.00 GB
Processing rate: 8 GB/s
Backup mode: SAN/NBD with changed block tracking
Start time: 30/10/2009 17:55:00
End time: 30/10/2009 17:55:42
Duration: 0:00:42

[Gostev]

Turned off VM, and/or no VSS integration used?

[zed999]

Turned off VM, and/or no VSS integration used?

VM was powered up, a fresh install of server 2003 and VSS was on......however the VM was not in production

[Gostev]

In that case - impressive you have some nice hardware and nicely tuned infrastructure there... thing is, VMware API operations (connecting to vCenter, scanning VM files and all that) use SOAP and this usually takes quite signifinant time... so I am suprised to see SOAP vCenter interactions, VSS snapshot creation/removal, plus some amount of changes copied (even if minor) - all that happening under 45 seconds! Never seen anything like this in my own lab

[birchy]

I have skimmed through the previous postings and there is some impressive speed.

Can i ask what vSphere setup you guys have?

We have been struggling to get over 12-15MB/s from our ESXi box with previous versions of VB&R, and we have 3TB of local VM's being backed up in agentless mode to a samba share.

I understand there was a previous issue with local storage being capped for bandwidth in both ESX and ESXi. And a few of these posts refer to SAN mode, which i assume if for VMs sitting on iSCSI storage. Please correct if i am wrong.

[Gostev]

Yes, most of the customers who posted above are using shared storaged and vStorage API SAN mode. Even if you do not have shared storage, but are on ESX(i) 4 - you should definitely switch from agentless Network mode to vStorage API Network mode in order to be able to leverage changed block tracking. While you will not see any differences in full backup speed, incremental processing speed should jump to 120-150MB/s plus (depending on the amount of changes).

[zed999]

Our Veeam Backup server is
Dell R710
Dual X5550 2.66GHz CPUs
12GB RAM, DDR3,
Windows Server 2008 x64
2 x SAS disks (OS and Veeam Installation path)
Target storage DAS MD1000 SATA2 7k2 (RAID 5 14+1) 1TB drives connected to server via SAS Perc 6/e. Write back cache enabled 512MB, FC 4Gb to source storage

EMC Clariion Cx3-10c, 4Gb Fibre, disk ranging from FC to SATA

ESX 4.0 Full

All backup jobs use VMware vStorage API in SAN with failover with "Use changed block tracking data" enabled

[Gostev]

Oh, that explains - you have superfast... everything

Veeam Backup loves 8 cores, you can run with Best compression easily if you'd like. Actual CPU is a dream too, server processors = greatest memory bandwidth and speed = good for on-the-fly dedupe and compression... Veeam Backup is pretty much the only application I know (except 3D or video processing) that can make use of modern hardware's potential

[zed999]

We have all jobs on BEST compression, when a full job is runing all 8 cores are in the 90%

Below are the CPUs on a increment run:
http://www.photoshack.com/displayimage. ... &uid=13868

[Suderman]

Hello,

I've upgraded to v4 recently ..

well I'm not impressed by the speeds I'm getting on replication jobs.
In fact I expected little bit more from new version.

I've heard that there will be no big improvement if I don't use ESX 4 but I count that there will be some (~+30 MB/s) improvement.

In my case there is no speed improvement from version 3.1
On average it's 48 ~ 61 MB/s

I'm using VC4 - ESX 3.5, 2GB FC SAN, EMC Clariion CX300 and CX3-10
Backup Server is Dell PE 6650 with 2 x Xeon 2,5 Ghz 4 GB RAM

What might be the reason for this ?
the SAN speed, backup server performance, Vi3 ?

or it's normal that there is no speed improvement taking into account I'm still using ESX 3.5 ?

Thanks.

[dkvello]

It's really moving fast in SAN mode, that's for sure
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total VM size: 560,00 GB
Processed size: 560,00 GB
Processing rate: 1001 MB/s
Backup mode: SAN/NBD with changed block tracking
Start time: 02.11.2009 20:20:07
End time: 02.11.2009 20:29:40
Duration: 0:09:33

[jgremillion]

I like the Enterprise Management Web Console. It's nice to have a central view of all the backup/replication servers.