NIC teaming in a virtual Veeam Proxy Server

[Didi7]

Hello everybody,

I am trying to find a way to speed up backups with a virtual Veeam Proxy Server machine, which usually use Hotadd to get access to SCSI-disks. If I use 2 vNICS in a virtual Switch (Standard not Distributed), I can use LAG (Etherchannel) on a Cisco switch to team the NICs in this Standard Switch. Unfortunately I cannot use the complete bandwith of 2GBit/s on one single virtual Veeam Backup Proxy machine. It's just for fail-over.

Someone advised to me to create a NIC team in the virtual machine itself, creating 2 virtual machine port groups in one virtual Standard Switch. In each VM port group one adapter (vNIC) is active, the other is standby and vice versa. Now, putting 2 NICs in a virtual Veeam Proxy Server and using native NIC teaming in this virtual Windows Server 2012 R2 machine, would that make sense and let me balance the backup traffic on both vNICs or do I end up with only 1GBit/s again?

In this case, the physical Veeam Repository Server (Windows Server 2012R2) would use LACP with 2 of his 4 physical NICs in a seperate VLAN.

Regards,
Didi7

[veremin]

Hi,

Before discussing NIC teaming on proxy server, can you tell us how typical job bottleneck statistics look like? May be, your major bottleneck is target which wouldn't benefit much from making proxy server faster.

Thanks.

[Didi7]

Hello,

the bottleneck is Network according to Veeam Backup Job statistics.

The storage is directly attached via iSCSI with 10GBit/s Ethernet, so that's not the bottleneck, the Backup Repository Server is the Veeam Backup Management in one machine and has 4x 1GBit/s Ethernet NICs, all of them etherchanneled in one LAG on a Cisco Switch atm.

Regards,
Didi7

[dellock6]

Hi,
so you're telling that the Veeam server is acting at the same time as proxy and repository, and is the only machine involved? Because in the title you wrote virtual proxy but then you talk here about a 4*1GBit network. On a 10G network I would simply use a vmxet3 adapter and use full 10G speed. Please give us some more info so we can better help...

PS: just a note, 10Gb ethernet does not automatically means "no bottleneck here".