Backup/Restore to/from USB is very very slow

[Igor N. M.]

Hi. I have a slowness problem in my environment.

I have an HP ML110 Gen9 server, with 16Gb of DDR4 ECC memory, 4 SATA3 HDs in raid 5.
For backup, I have a 3TB USB 3.0 HD.
Everything new, bought for 2 weeks. I tested 100% of disks and systems.

I have VMWare 6.0 HP U2. In it I have a VM Windows 2008 R2, a Linux Ubuntu 14 LTS VM and a Windows 2008 R2 VM with the Veeam B & R 9.0 (6GB of memory and 4 CPUs).

I put the USB disk in the VM with the Veeam, using the USB 2.0 interface.

The problem is that backup and restore files are very slow.
It took 48 hours to restore 680Gb of data !!!
At an average of 4Mbps !! Extremely slow.

What can it be? What is the best way to work with veeam and backup to USB disk?


The restoration fees I have are:
49.8Gb at 7Mb / s
47.5Gb at 2Mb / s
549.5Gb at 4MB / s
84Gb at 3MB / s

[DaveWatkins]

At USB2 speeds you're never going to see good performance no matter what you do. Those speeds are a lot worse than the theoretical max of USB2 but given the redirection through VMWare I'm not even remotely surprised.

I would say if you want to backup to USB then connect it to a real physical windows server and set that up as a repo server, and make sure it's USB3

[Igor N. M.]

This was not an answer...
It is very easy to talk to spend more money on another server, more licenses, more services, more UPS, generator, refrigeration ...... Imagine if every problem was easy to solve like this. Spend more money and the problem was gone...
And had enough money left over, I would have bought a NAS and not a USB HD...

I researched a lot before coming here and I see that it is a recurring problem with Veeam. Just go on Google, or even here in the forum that there are several similar issues. I tried several and several but nothing made the speed increase.
A simple copy / paste has speeds of 15, 20Mbps... And the Veeam is at 4Mbps... it's something in Veeam!
And I have other similar environments, but with Veeam 6.5 and the rate is 10, 20 Mbps. This new version is too slow!

So, I believe that there should be some different configuration to be made in 9.5...

[Mike Resseler]

Igor,

What is your configuration (incremental / reverse / forever...) ? The restore seems indeed a bit slow (although this can be caused by many things). What about the backup itself? What is the speed of that?

Thanks

Mike

[Igor N. M.]

Hi, Mike.

In this case, I'm restoring from a full backup. It has only one file.
But, I did a backup test as well. And the full backup was at the same rates. The others are incremental.

Briefly, I backed up my entire environment. It was an ESX 5.0 on an HP ML110 G7. I used Veeam 6.5. The backup was done on a USB 3.0 disk. The rate was 15Mbps.
When I restored the new server (HP ML110 Gen9, ESX 6.0 HP U2, Veeam 9.5), using the same USB disk, that rate was at 4Mbps !!

So, newer and more powerful hardware. Newer software. Worst Performance ...
Now I am mounting a VM with Windows 2016 to test with USB 3.0, since 2008 R2 does not support....

... so I do not understand. In the old system I had an acceptable performance. In the new, I do not have 1/3!

[Mike Resseler]

Igor,

There is probably some component in between (with the new version) that is causing the delay. Can you open a support ticket? Our engineers will be able to view the flow (throughout the entire chain) and see where the slowness is occurring.

PS: After a backup, what does it say about bottleneck? Target? Source? Proxy? ...

[oliverL]

This was not an answer...
It is very easy to talk to spend more money on another server, more licenses, more services, more UPS, generator, refrigeration ...... Imagine if every problem was easy to solve like this. Spend more money and the problem was gone...
And had enough money left over, I would have bought a NAS and not a USB HD...

If Money is really the problem, ask your boss how much money your company will lose in 5h where nothing is working while you restore 680GB with 40MB/s because of USB 2.0(40MB/s are laboratory stats and you can't forget the virtualization overhead).