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dkeathii
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SAN-mode backup with non-san target?

Post by dkeathii »

Is it possible, or beneficial to run a Veeam backup in SAN mode, when the target is an ESX server just using DAS? (MD1000) I'm seeing good speeds in network mode using service console agent now (6 concurrent backups hitting about 1100Mb/s) but it's saturating one of the cores on each of the 2 ESX hosts I'm backing up.

Thanks,

Daniel
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Re: SAN-mode backup with non-san target?

Post by Gostev »

Daniel, in case of backing up "fat" ESX server to DAC, network backup is definitely best choice because it leverages service console agent working directly on your ESX server, so backup data never hits your network, which is good.

If you are concerned about CPU load, I can suggest reducing the number of concurrent jobs. Sounds like you are not using "Best" compression because this would load your ESX host even more. I suggest that you use default "Optimal" compression because it uses algorithm that requires minimal CPU resources (specifically optimized to run on ESX host). I don't recommend that you disable compression because it may actually slow down your backups (more data to write to target storage), yet it won't reduce ESX CPU load noticeably.

By the way, do you really get 1.1GB/s combined, or was it a typo? :D
dkeathii
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Re: SAN-mode backup with non-san target?

Post by dkeathii »

This is my setup:

2x PE2950 attached via 2 Dell 2716 switches using the onboard bcm nics to an MD3000i with an MD1000 attached for a total of about 14TB storage(about 6TB used). Using vmware sw iscsi initiator.

The 3rd 2950 will be at a different site with a 100Mb connection. It's currently sitting right next to the others with a 100mb connection. (It had 1gb for the first pass, now I have it configured as it would be at the remote site, with traffic going through an openvpn tunnel)

the VCB server is connected into the san switches as well but I'm not leveraging it with veeam. What I'm wanting to do is replicate from the SAN to the 3rd 2950 without hosing the 2 production machines. Right now a replication pass eats a full core on each machine using service console, between the sw iscsi and service console, not to mention iscsi bandwidth. The DR(3rd) machine is idle so its not a problem, but if I can offload the backups from the SAN to the vcb machine I'll feel better about the whole thing. Thing is, I'm not sure if Veeam can be configured to read the backups from the SAN, but write to the target via the service console agent. That would be ideal in my situation I believe. Sourcing would be done directly from the SAN, and the target would have to be via service console as the DAS isn't accessible otherwise.

As for the speed...that was 1.1Gbits, or about 135MBytes/s, That was on the first pass which had to transfer ALL of the data. Subsequent passes where just the changes are replicated are seeing ~270MBytes/s. The target md1000 is just configured as a 14 7200rpm drive raid5 array with 6 ~2tb luns on it, so I'm sure the target storage was limiting my speed on the first pass. Source is a mix of raid10 and and raid6 luns, I doubt I'm hitting the perfomance cap on them. I left the compression set to the default of 'Best'


All that being said, with vSphere (supposedly)right around the corner and it's spiffy new storage system, as far as replication is concerned I don't think I'll be doing things this way much longer =) I'm still using the Veeam trial for now but once I get ahold of vSphere and the next version of Veeam to leverage it, I feel I'll be making a few purchases =)

Daniel
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Re: SAN-mode backup with non-san target?

Post by Gostev »

Daniel,

Yes, you can read data directly from SAN, and write it to target via service console agent. This is exactly what happens if you configure your job to use VCB SAN mode, and define backup destinatios as "fat" ESX (or any Linux server) with DAS attached.

Default compression level is actually "Optimal". Using "Best" compression would definitely put pretty high load on ESX server CPU.

I agree with your conclusion about backup storage being limited factor for initial backup.

Veeam Backup 3.1 with vSphere support will be made available around the same time as vSphere release.

Thank you.
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