Veeam B&R, Azure and bandwidth cost...

[bib_ak]

Hello,

I recently signed up for a 30 day trial for Windows Azure. Configured a small Windows 2008r2 server, site-to-site VPN and a 1TB disk. Configured Veeam B&R 7 on local location to use "secondary target", with a copy job pointed to the Azure server. All went perfect. Except... : after 10 days the trial credit was empty...

Almost all the free credit were used for "outbound" traffic - last night the copy job transferred 512 GB data *to* Azure, and 356 GB *from* Azure. The *to* data is free, the *from* data is not.

Now my questions: is this normal Veeam B&R 7 behavior? The copy job of last night ended in about an hour, since it's only incremental changes - no way I have the speed to transfer over 500 GB in an hour! So Azure must be counting the transfer wrong - but my main concern is the outbound traffic of 356 GB! I didn't download anything from Azure, so somehow Veeam sync'ed all this data?

OK, I know there's a Cloud edition of Veeam, but I have so many customers with the regular B&R, so I really would wish to make this work. But the way this test ended, I'm afraid it's going to be a very costly service...

[bib_ak]

Update (different copy job, different customer): last night was last sunday of the month, so I guess the transformation causes the high traffic - here's a screenshot from a remote site (simply a NAS box, accessible over VPN):

This transformation will take many days since it's obvious that *all* data are re-transferred in both directions! No good... I must be missing something fundamental here, this re-transfer seems completely wasted to me...

[foggy]

What type of backup repository you have configured in the cloud?

[Gostev]

@foggy

He is using:

Configured a small Windows 2008r2 server, site-to-site VPN and a 1TB disk

@bib_ak

Now my questions: is this normal Veeam B&R 7 behavior?

This is definitely not expected, and I don't know how to explain what you are saying... even when transformation takes place - it is done locally by the backup repository server, not over the network.

OK, I know there's a Cloud edition of Veeam, but I have so many customers with the regular B&R, so I really would wish to make this work. But the way this test ended, I'm afraid it's going to be a very costly service...

You approach will work much better than Cloud Edition in terms of performance and traffic consumption (especially for those customers who have Enterprise Plus edition with WAN acceleration). Having compute in the cloud helps tremendously, this will always beat copying backups to "dumb" storage as Cloud Edition does.

[bib_ak]

Configured a small Windows 2008r2 server, site-to-site VPN and a 1TB disk

Yes, standard Windows backup repository on the Azure Windows server

this is not expected, and I don't know how to explain this... besides, transformation is done locally, by the backup repository server.

In other words, transformation in this case should be done isolated on the Azure Windows server, with no traffic in or out. Alright, then this is NOT what causes the outbound traffic, seen from the Azure side...

[bib_ak]

Sorry about the Norwegian text in the picture... There seems to be about a fair amount of data sent out from Azure server for every piece of data received:

I hope I'm not wasting your time on an an Azure issue, or misconfiguration on my side, but I'm so exited to get this working - and it's simply not selling with the amount of outgoing traffic generated.

[Gostev]

Is there any way to get more details on what is inside of that 1TB? That's a whole lot of data!

Perhaps you could also set another backup repository locally at your site, backup the same content there (just clone the job and choose the new repository). Then, compare the IN/OUT traffic on backup repository. This will let you isolate the issue to Azure, or prove there is something wrong elsewhere.

If the issue is found to be specific to Azure, I will be able to escalate this within Microsoft after the holidays.

[bib_ak]

Alright, will set up a local test to compare, no problem.

What's inside the 1047.1 GB traffic? That's just traffic generated from Veeam Copy Job, nothing else. The 1 TB hard disk is about half full with backup files.

[Gostev]

Veeam copy job should be the 1598.07 GB graph (IN traffic), if I understood you correctly.
I am wondering what data is in the 1047.1 GB graph (OUT traffic). This cannot be related to Veeam.

[bib_ak]

That was what I expected as well! But, there's absolutely no other activity going on on that server except the Backup Copy Job. Unfortunately, there's no further details on the 1047.1 GB traffic. But the graphs clearly indicates outgoing traffic increases in accordance with incoming traffic.

[m.novelli]

Nice thread, I'm interested in this use case of Windows Azure and about this issue

Marco

[scourchesne]

Hi,
any update on that situation ? What was the results ?

Regards,

[frankive]

We are also considering using Azure VM as a third backup location outside our own datacenter.
How did this go?

[EzE]

Anybody else doing this and experiencing outbound data charges from Azure? Any update to this thread? We are looking to do this same process with version 8. Outbound data will kill our budget.

[Gostev]

It's been well over a year since the original post, and I have not heard of anyone else observing similar outbound data stream from Azure, so OP's issue was likely due to some other app. If you are seeing similar behavior, it should be easy to find the source of this network traffic with Wireshark or alike, and block the application with the Windows firewall. Thank!