Virtual Appliance Mode questions

[dspac]

Hello,

We're using Veeam Backup and Replication 5 (enteprise edition, if that matters).

We use NFS datastores, so we're using Veeam in Virtual Appliance mode, and I was just curious what general performance numbers other folks were seeing (although the FAQ said this should be fairly close to SAN access mode).

Our backups are going from various NFS datastores to another NFS datastore, everything is backended on NetApp filers. Hosts are largely ESX 4, got a nice mix of V4 and V7 hardware guests (although we're trying to clean that up). Our Veeam box has 4 GB of RAM and 4 VCPUs, although CPU seems to be the only thing that really gets hit hard during a backup.

For our full backups, the overall speeds are roughly 10-30 MB/s (according to the Realtime Statistics report) and incrementals seem to be around 120 - 150 MB/s. In theory we shouldn't be doing too many fulls, but are these generally in line with numbers other people are seeing?

In terms of scaling up Veeam in a backup appliance model, I'm assuming the general "best practice" is to just add more Veeam VMs?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello, actually what FAQ says is that Virtual Appliance should be fairly close to SAN mode for block storage (FC/iSCSI). As you already noted from FAQ, SAN mode cannot be used with NFS, so there is no comparison here.

30MB/s for full backup from NFS storage is pretty typical based on what I heard from other customers using NFS as production storage... a few things you may want to check:
1. Make sure check CPU load is not 100% during backup (not sure what you mean by "hard"). 80-90% is okay.
2. Make sure NFS storage is on dedicated physical network.

Thanks!

[dspac]

Yeah, depending on how many jobs we're running simultaneously, we're seeing up to 80-90% cpu usage on the Veeam server. Our NFS storage is on 10Gbe, so we should be in good shape there.

Thanks for the info.