Veeam Backup 4: multipayhing and vStorageApi perfomance

[pizang]

This is a question to Veeam employees.

I was reading http://www.veeam.com/files/new/veeam_ba ... ts_new.pdf and new features sound great! I have some questions though.

vStorageApi will replace or rather can be used instead of VCB. Does performance changes on the same hardware? Is it somehow better? I do not expect filan benchmarks but just your opinion. I do expect faster incremental backups but what about full backups?

What about multipathing on vStorageAPI? As we know VCB is very picky when it comes to multipathing - you need a specific target to make VCB work faster. What about vStroageAPI?

[Gostev]

Full backup performance should remain the same, because presumably under the hood the vStorage API uses the same private APIs which VCB components were based on. So most likely multipathing issue will remain... but let's wait for testing results from real-world environments first before making final conclusion.

[mdornfeld]

If we currently use "VCB mode" in our backups...
Does this mean that we'll no longer have to have VCB installed at all on the Veeam backup server? Or is there something else that we'll have to have installed in it's place?

I'm currently running vSphere4 with VCB 1.5 U1 (150805) from VMware.

Thanks Gostev.

[Gostev]

Hello Matt, no - you will no longer need to install and babysit VCB framework. All you will need to have installed is Veeam Backup. I do not recommend to get rid of VCB right away though, just so you can switch to it in case of some vStorage API problems in your environment. Just remember that vStorage API is 1.0 release.

One limitation I can state right away for example, is that it does not support vCenter servers with customized web service ports (anything but the default 443). This is to be addressed in future vStorage API release in mid-2010, you can use VMware SR# 1433625431 for reference (this is our support case with VMware on the issue).