Slow restore job speed

[Adrien13]

Hello folks,

I would like to ask for your help identifying the following issue : Restoring a backup is dreadfully slow at 15Mb/sec.

While the daily backup creation job peaks at 300 Mb/sec.

Restoring a VM at this rate takes hours, and restoring them all would take days.

The environment :

- Veeam B&R 6.5

- ESXi 5.0.0

What I have tried so far, unsuccessfully :

1) Disabling the antivirus

2) Disabling VAAI (VMware vSphere Storage APIs Array Integration) by following these steps for the relevant ESXi in vSphere Client :

DataMover :
- Moving DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit from 1 to 0
- Moving DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove from 1 to 0

VMFS3 :
- Moving VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking from 1 to 0

I would upgrade ESXi 5.0.0 to 5.5.0u3 but Veeam 6.5 isn't compatible with anything past 5.0.0 so for now this isn't an option. Old software, I know.

Regards.

[foggy]

Hi Adrien, are you restoring to the same source host? What transport mode is being utilized to populate the datastore during restore?

[Adrien13]

Hi Alexander,

Yes I am restoring to the same source host.

The transport mode would be over network, through a dedicated 1 Gb switch.

Veeam is on a physical machine and it is it's own proxy.

Yesterday's restore went as slowly as 9 Mb/sec and it took 5 hours to restore a 300 Gb server.

Regards.

[Adrien13]

Copying a file to the datastore from any Windows computer through vSphere client results in the same transfer speeds (9-12 Mb/sec)

[tdewin]

You might consider a hotadd proxy appliance for restore. Some customers have a disabled one, just for full vm restore

Also, if you need the VM up and running in no time, you might consider Instant VM Recovery

BTW over network means that it passes by the ESXi VMkernel. Any chance the management network is connected to a 100Mbit/s switch / uplink?