02109934 Exchange 2010 VM Full APP AWARE Performance

[PJBelt]

At fist let me say I am new to the BaR and am currently trying to maximize the deployment on a very limited budget.
Here is my current Environment;
Storage;
1 VNXe 3100 4TB San
1 Buffalo DN15000 16TB NAS Configured for iSCSI at 10TB (Is Isolated on VLAN for Host Connection)
VMWare
2 ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 Running Essentials
1 VCenter Appliance

VEEAM Environment
1 Backup and Replication Server Virtual Hosted on ESXi with the most resources available. (Coincidentally is the same host running the Target VM of the case ID.)

Exchange Environment;
1 server hosting additional mail box stores for other Corporate Business Units. Machine Storage Size 1.6TB Registered 1.2TB Through VEEAM

When initiating the first Full Application Aware backup of this VM, I noticed a severe performance issue on the VM and Strange activity while monitoring the Performance of the VM Enviroment and select machines from VCenter.
VNXe encountered 2 IOP penalties during which e-mail stopped flowing for 15 minutes directly after the first penalty. The next penalty made an outage of over 30 minutes. In between these the mail flow continued but at a very - very slow pace.

I am not sure the BACKUP environment is configured properly. However the backup did complete successfully.
If anyone (New or Experienced) has seen this type of behavior, can you please send some advice?

[DaveWatkins]

It sounds to me like your SAN can't provide the IOPs required for the VM to still function adequately while being read. Although if this was your first backup it would have been a full which would put more than normal load on it. You could try limiting the tasks operating at once in either the proxy or repository to try and lower the IOP load on the SAN or simple disable parallel processing in the main Veeam configuration

Depending on your Veeam license you might also have the Storage Latency Control in the main Veeam Configuration that may also help

[foggy]

Also, depending on the license, consider using SAN snapshots to reduce impact on production environment.