Slow restores. Does vCenter need 10g?

[knalbone]

I've been working with Veeam support for a while on speeding up my issues with slow restores from Veeam B&R. Usually <30 MB/s restore rate on each disk.

Lately I've been wondering if our bottleneck could be the vCenter server itself. Everything in our architecture is connected to our 10gig network except vCenter.

Do all restore modes except direct SAN use vCenter is some form or another?

[veremin]

What kind of restore are you talking about? What mode do you leverage for restore? NBD, Hot-Add? Can you describe connection between VB&R server, repository, production hosts in more details?

[knalbone]

I'm trying to restore the entire VM.

The target has been identified as the bottleneck.

My VB&R server, and proxy are VMs, as is vCenter.

All my repos are are physical windows storage servers and have the proxy role installed as well.

My environment consists of a 1gig frontend switch stack and a 10gig switch stack on the backend. There are multiple VLANs on both switches, but there is no overlap in regards to VLANs or subnets between the frontend/backend networks.

All VMware hosts are connected to both networks as are my physical repositories. My B&R server and proxy have connections to both networks. vCenter is only accessible on the frontend 1gig network.

[foggy]

You didn't mention what transport mode is used to populate target datastore. Make sure one of the virtual proxies is used for restore, or, in case network mode is used, data goes over the fast network.

[knalbone]

Yes I did forget to mention what mode. The truth is that I've tried NBD, hot-add and direct SAN. They are all relatively slow though. Most times restores are <30MB/s. Sometimes they can go above 40MB/s if I'm lucky. I'm trying to ensure that I'm using my faster network, but I'm not sure what I may be missing from a configuration standpoint that could be affecting this. Hence my original question, how does the vCenter server come into play for the various restore modes and should it have a 10gig interface to help restore speed?

[foggy]

vCenter Server is not involved in the actual data transfer, only in management tasks. I'd try to track the issue down by trying to restore to some other storage or from other repository. Log files should also tell what particular operations take most of the time.

[knalbone]

Most of my datastores are just LUNs on the same SAN, but I do have a couple on a different "older" SAN. I don't know why it never occurred to me to try restoring to the older SAN or why support never suggested it. I've got a test restore running now. Both disks are restoring > 75 MB/s which is much faster. Why this is working makes no sense to me, but it gives me something to go on the next time I talk to support. Looks like I may have to get my SAN vendor involved now too, but I feel like I'm at least making progress. Thank you v.Eremin and foggy.