Source bottleneck - Odd

[kano666]

Hi

We have vSphere 4.0 and Veeam B&R 6.1 installed on a Server 2008 VM.

Our VMs are all running on the same datastore which is made up from several LUNs on the same RAID group on a iSCSI SAN.

We are seeing an odd problem whereby the backups never go above about 25 Mb/sec and Veeam is reporting the Source as the bottleneck. Which initially i thought OK the SAN is performing rather poorly but whatever....but then i started another couple of backup jobs at the same time, all for VMs running on the same storage and the performance of the first is not effected and the total rate was about 70Mb/Sec.

Is there a limit somewhere in veeam for the speed of a job? It seems odd that the source is reported as the bottleneck when the source was clearly able to provide more bandwidth as evidenced by the other jobs not impacting on the speed of each other?

I am a complete noob to veeam so i could well have set things up wrong or missing something obvious!

cheers in advance

[nielsengelen]

There is no limit defined in Veeam. Which type of SAN are you using? How is this SAN designed (RAID10, RAID50,...)

In which way are your backups build up? Incremental, reversed incremental,...

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Andy,

Try to apply these recommendations, should increase the overall performance of your backup jobs:
Improving direct-from-SAN backup speed with iSCSI SAN

Thanks!

[kano666]

None of the tips really worked for me.

I have noticed that I get very poor performance when downloading/uploading a file from my hosts using the vmware vsphere client which may be the root cause of the backup being slow. I am on vsphere 4.0.

[Vitaliy S.]

If none of the tips worked, then I guess you need to further look into your storage configuration. BTW - can you please confirm that your VMs are backed up with direct SAN mode and not via network mode?

[kano666]

I have configured my backup proxy to use direct SAN and have unchecked the box to allow failover to network mode so I am assuming it is...I cant see anywhere the backup mode is displayed tho so i cant be 100% sure

[kjc3303]

If you go into the job statistics (click on a VM left pane) it will tell you what proxy it is using and will have the mode in brackets next to it (in the right hand pane).

Cheers

Kev

[kano666]

Ah!

OK its not using direct SAN. doh!

How do it get it to use direct SAN?

I have connected the Veeam B&R VM to our ISCSI network in vsphere and used the iSCSI initiator in server 2008 to connect to the SAN.
The drives are visible in Disk Management (although they are showing as offline, is this OK?). I notice that the individual LUNs are showing in disk management tho and our VMFS are made up of several LUNs (extents), does veeam backup and replication 6.5 support this setup?
I have also rescanned the vcentre server but no datastores are showing up in there so something is wrong

help me!

[Gostev]

Please read sticky FAQ topic, as it has excessive information regarding setting up Direct SAN Access. If you still need help, open a support case and our engineers will assist you setting everything up via webex. Thanks!

[kjc3303]

Is you B&R server also your proxy?

[kano666]

yep all on 1 VM at the moment

[kjc3303]

Ah prob best speaking to support then. Out of interest have you tried virtual appliance mode?