REFS/XFS

[FRANCISRUBEN]

Hi Team,

I am new to Veeam and was going through the Veeam Sizing tool.

https://vse.veeambp.com/#/workload/edit/0


I do see REFS/XFS option under Veeam Sizing link.

what is REFS/XFS

I would like to understand on what circumstances we select yes for REFS/XFS option.

By default it is set to No.

[Regnor]

If you format your backup repository with ReFS and XFS you can benefit from advanced features like fast cloning or spaceless full backups.
This means if you configure your job to use synthetic full backups, those will be created much faster then compared to non ReFS/XFS file systems and take less space on disk (only the delta/differences compared to your initial full backup).

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110
https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-ref ... suite.html

[joebranca]

Our Linux admin mentioned reflinks are not supported for XFS on CentOS7/RHEL7 which is what we plan to deploy the immutable backup repositories. Is that the case we cannot use fast cloning on those distros?

[tjurgens]

It would be best to use a repo that does support reflinks. Ubuntu 20.04 is a good choice, and often recommended by Veeam. From my quick googling it shows RHEL8 supports reflinks on XFS.

[PTide]

@joebranca,
That's right, reflink is in the foundation of Fact Clone functionality - without reflinks there will be no Fact Clone. Make sure to check whether the OS of your choice enables reflink flag by default when you call mkfs.xfs (otherwise you will need to specify reflink=1 manually). You also will need CRC flag set to 1.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Please note that our system requirements have the dedicated section listing all Linux distributions supported for advanced XFS integration.

[jamcool]

We are moving our repositories from Windows server 2016 to Ubuntu 20.04 to take advantage of the Hardened Immutable Repository to get all the benefits such as isolate our backups from if AD is compromised and backups cannot be deleted except if expired or directly from the repository server itself. While we are primary a Windows shop, the Hardened Immutable Repository seems to make Security and Management stop asking questions about being compromised. . Our testing so far as been very good with XFS format (we have REFS with the Windows 2016) but did have some problems with single-user credential part and had to work with one of our Linux admins. Suggest following the steps user guide

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

[soncscy]

It would be best to use a repo that does support reflinks. Ubuntu 20.04 is a good choice, and often recommended by Veeam. From my quick googling it shows RHEL8 supports reflinks on XFS.

Would second the Ubutnu/Debian line. I know some *nix admins are very adamant about their distro of choice, but my experience with setting this up with clients is that Ubuntu is more performant as a repository†, and for non-*nix-ey persons, a lot easier to get a grip on.

† I have no idea if this is just subjective, but it really does seem like Ubuntu and Debian handle the data processing a lot better.

[Gostev]

Happy to say it's not subjective, we saw the same in a side by side performance testing of a few different distros. If I remember correctly, the conclusion was that this has to deal with the default distro settings around I/O handling (udev rules for the I/O elevator and read-ahead), which can have a significant impact.

Reposting my 2 years old post from the internal forums:

Here are some curious backup proxy stress testing results with the current v10 build, using different job and compression settings.

WS2019:
Most consistent performance overall regardless of proxy load.

Ubuntu 19, Debian 10:
By far top performance specifically under heavy load, worse than WS2019 under lighter loads.

openSUSE 15.1:
Very consistent and only slight worse performance than WS2019.

CentOS8:
Most inconsistent performance (all over the place depending on load).

CentOS7:
Most terrible performance overall, not recommended.