Processing Rate Question

[jp1]

Hello all.

I'd like to start off by saying that I'm new to Veeam. In fact, I'm just in the setup and testing stages of bringing up our first virtual environment using ESXi 5.1. We have 3 HP DL3060G8 hosts and an HP P2000 iSCSI SAN w/18 900GB 10K disks. The plan is to use 2 hosts as production servers and the 3rd will run Veeam and be a temporary host if the 2 main ones have issues. Host 3 has direct attached storage w/5 1TB 7.2K disks where we will be saving the Veeam backups to. All three hosts have 2 dedicated NIC's each to the SAN.

As a test, I installed Veeam in a Windows 2008R2 VM on host 3 and created another Windows 2008R2 VM on host 2 w/1 40GB and 150GB disks. I fired off a backup job and got a processing rate of 81 MB/s and the bottleneck listed as Source. Is 81 MB/s good, bad, or it depends? It took approximately 40 minutes to backup the VM.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Jonathan, this is indeed a good speed for the full backup. The bottleneck stats show the percent that every component involved in the backup process is busy so there will always be a bottleneck in every setup. Bottleneck source indicates that the disk reader component spends all of the time reading the data, because the following stages are always ready to accept more data for processing. Please refer to the sticky FAQ topic for further explanation.

[yizhar]

Hi.

Performance looks good but maybe you can get better.
Are you using SAN mode?
Can you post the whole job results here?

Yizhar

[jp1]

Hopefully these are the results you meant, I got these from the Statistics of the completed job.

Duration: 40:03
Processing rate: 81 MB/s
Processed 190GB
Read 186GB
Transferred 5.2GB (35.9x)

VM size: 190GB
Load: Source 99% > Proxy 78% > Network 0% > Target 0%
Primary Bottleneck: Source

Again, the VM being backed up is in a datastore that resides on the SAN. The VM running Veeam is in a datastore that resides on DAS on host 3. The repository is a drive (vdmk) in that VM.

This is my first crack on setting up Veeam and will take any and all suggestions on changes.

Thanks!!

[veremin]

It’s clear from the information given that the source disk reader spend most of the time reading the data from the storage, while other backup components are idling.

So, I’m wondering what backup proxy mode is being used. Is it a Direct SAN, Hot-Add, or Network one? This information can be taken from the corresponding job session statistics (look for special [san], [hot-add], [nbd] metrics).

Thanks.

[jp1]

According to the statistics: "Using source proxy VMware Backup Proxy [hotadd].

[Vitaliy S.]

Then you're already getting maximum from your storage, as HotAdd is the second most optimal processing mode. Configuring direct SAN backup mode might give you slightly better job performance rates, but the difference will not be noticeable during incremental job runs.

[jp1]

Thanks guys.

I did add a bunch of files to the test VM and ran an incremental. I believe that produced a rate of something 170 MB/s, so it sounds like I'm on the right track. Unfortunately I can't give exact stats since I deleted the VM running Veeam since it was only running as a test and now I'm setting everything up for production.

[foggy]

I did add a bunch of files to the test VM and ran an incremental. I believe that produced a rate of something 170 MB/s, so it sounds like I'm on the right track.

Note that incremental runs are typically a few times faster than the full backup.