Small time user, backup speed help?

[whodkne]

I run a fairly small hosting operation so budgets aren't up there and even affording Veeam is going to be tough. But during my trial of 5.0 I am seeing backup speeds of around 20MB/s for the "full" backup and speeds upwards from there for subsequent diff backups. Others seem to have posted about much faster rates and I have an inkling of where my slowness is but I am hoping others can possibly give some precise recommendations I can go after for speeding up the backups.

Setup is basically this:

(3) Dell R710's as ESX hosts with several VM's each. On board storage of SAS drives in a RAID10 configuration. Neither storage speed here nor usage of the servers is a huge burden, everything is really overpowered and under used.

Gig copper network with a DLink managed gig switch to which all hosts are connected as well as a few supporting Dell servers, one of which is running Veeam. That server is an older dual core Xenon with 4GB ram, not the most powerful but it just runs vCenter Server and Veeam and again, we're a low overhead operation.

Backup goes via NBD with changed block tracking to a Dlink DNS-321 (yes yes, I know) running 2TB SATA drives in RAID1. I am almost certin this is where most of my bottleneck is so this would be the focus of my upgrades but still any advice here is much appreciated.

Going to some faster NAS over gig is one option.... going to a NAS device with an iSCSI target is another. Both options would include looking at drives and speeds to get the most out of my money. Going SAN isn't fesible at this time I'm quite sure.

I do see the option for backup processing of "Virtual Appliance" which sounds like that might be a better way to go if I can. I don't mind running Veeam on one of my VM's if it will make a huge difference, I just imagine the bottleneck is still the NAS.

Any comments? Thoughts?

thanks!

[Gostev]

Hi, am I understanding this correctly that you are using local storage for your ESX hosts? What ESX version do you use? Thanks!

[whodkne]

Correct each server has a SAS raid 10 array. Esx 4.1.

[Gostev]

In that case, given that you are already on ESX 4.1, the only way to improve backup performance as far as I could see is installing Veeam Backup in a VM on each host, and using the Virtual Appliance mode to backup all VMs located on the same host.

People reporting much higher performance are all using shared storage with either direct SAN access or virtual appliance job processing modes... network backup is supposed to be slow. Although I do not know if having "slow" backup would really matter for me as long as backup was fitting in my backup window. And based on your environment size and numbers, you should be able to do that easily once initial full backup is done.

Thanks!