Surebackup Virtual Lab

[remko.de.koning]

Hi, I have been playing with Surebackup and its virtual lab.
The virtual lab is running on one of the three available HyperVisors and are connected via a 1 GB lan to the backup server.
Testing a surebackup of one VM is going OK but when I want to test for example my Exchange environment I need to power up 4 VM's.
1 domaincontroller, 1 CAS server and 2 mailbox servers.
This works but it is extremely slow.
I am guessing that it is just a bit to much for this 1 GB line to handle.
I was wondering if I could install the HyperVisor role on my Server 2012 R2 backup server and set-up my virtual lab on this machine.
Are their any pro's or con's doing so?
Would this imply that I need any extra Veeam licenses for this to work?

Thanks for your thoughts on this

Remko

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Remko,

SureBackup job performance heavily depends on the backup repository IO capabilities. Can you please tell me on what type of hardware do you store your backups?

Thanks!

[remko.de.koning]

Sure, we have a HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 with local attached SATA storage. A bunch of 1 TB disks in a RAID 5 setup resulting in approx 19 TB of backupstorage.
https://www.spareit.nl/servers/sparepar ... m1000fbfvr
Writing : 160 MB/s
Reading : 260 MB/s

[remko.de.koning]

Also, forgot to mention.

I am using REVERSED incrementals on a dedup volume. The server only dedups files older than 4 days. If not mistaken this should not give a performance penalty on disk as the files for SureBackup do not need to be dehydrated.
Is my assumption correct?

[emachabert]

Performance depends on the number of drives at the repo side, the RAID level and the amount of cache on the controler. I don't think the problem is the bandwidth because 1gb (120MB/s) should be enough for only 4 VM.You are indicating sequential speed, which is far from what you'll get with random reads workload such as Instant Recovery.
I suppose the Mailbox servers are the ones demanding a huge amount of I/O, since there is a CAS server I also suppose you are running Exchange 2k7, which is known to be a demanding workload in terms of I/O.
Since you are using a reversed incremental, the best performance should be obtained when using the lastest restore point because you will only hit the vrb file.
Also, what kind of storage are you using for the redirected writes ? This point is crucial for Instant Recovery performance.

[remko.de.koning]

Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated!

It is actually a Exchange 2013 server, but yes, you are right that the mailbox servers are giving the biggest problem. I figured that it must be the 1 GB line between the backup server (seperate building) and the HyperVisors as the local storage should be fast enough for this task.
As my bottleneck is always the network throughput I figured that this must be the source of my problems. That's why I was wondering if I could setup my SureBackup lab on my backup server itself.
Before I buy additional memory for this machine and am sure that no extra licenses are required I thought it would be good to ask above question

For the surebackup I use the .vbk only.

Additional info:
We have 3 HP Proliant DL 360 (HyperVisors) servers (each 160 GB RAM) attached to a HP MSA 2040 SAN with 4 X 1GB NIC teamed to each controller of the MSA. The MSA has two controllers.
These server do not show any indication that they are busy at all

[emachabert]

Sorry i was thinking of vbk and wrote vrb

From my experience, 1gb link is good enough in many cases, even when powering on some databases or Exchange serrvers, and obtaining 120MB/s of random reads from the backup repository is challenging in many circumstances.

Have you monitored bandwidth usage in windows resources monitor during the process ?

[remko.de.koning]

I will fire up a surebackup tommorow (end of the workday in this timezone) and see what it does. Will let you know.

[remko.de.koning]

I have tested the speed on the network for just one machine. This is approx 380-400 Mbps (50 MB/s)
I just realized I have network throttling active at 80 MB/s during office hours . My backup server is located in a small branch office just outside our facility. If I don't throttle the network traffic the users in this branch office will be angry
Offcourse network backups take place during off hours but sometimes it is needed to do this during office hours.
It looks like my network is the bottle neck here. At least during business hours.

Getting back to my original question. Can I use my backup server for my virtual lab? The server is powerfull enough and I guess I only need to install the HyperVisor role and install extra memory. Do I need any additional licenses for Veeam?

[foggy]

Yes, you can do that, no extra Veeam licenses are required to run SureBackup.

[remko.de.koning]

Thanks for the confirmation. I will try to convince my manager to spend some extra money on memory for this machine.

[emachabert]

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you found where the problem comes from.