Slow performance backing up to laptop

[jjohnson]

I have searched and searched and searched. Maybe it is because it is Friday afternoon and my brain is dead, but I can not find a simple installation and setup guide for Veeam. I have it installed, but I know it is not right. I am only seeing 4MB/s transfer speed on a backup to a network share. I know this is not the best way of doing it, but I am still playing around with the product.

Could someone please point me to a user guide?

For more infomation on my setup, keep reading.

I have 3 Physical Servers licensed with VMware Essentials Plus.
I have an EMC VNXe3300 as my shared storage.
I have 18 VM's all residing on a NFS share on the VNXe box.

I have tried installing Veeam v.6 as a VM and saving backups locally, which works great. Except I do not have enough storage on the VNXe3300 to do that for all of my VM's. I have added a shared drive on my laptop as a repository and set my laptop as a Proxie. Now, if I try to use the laptop repository, my transfer drops to 4-6 MB/s. When I look at the realtime statistics, it says my bottleneck is the network at 98%. I have 40% network utilazation on my laptop and 2-9% network utilazation on the Veeam VM.

Ultimately, I would like to use the Veeam VM to backup to a seperate SAN. I can setup either ESXi or Windows on the server connected to that SAN. I am not sure how it would react differently than my laptop storage.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Gostev]

Hi Jeff, the User Guide is available on the product page of our web site, under Resources.

Your real performance bottleneck is your laptop's hard drive speed, however because your laptop serves as both proxy and repository, the bottleneck is shown as "network" (bottleneck analysis assumes that there is always either storage or ethernet network between proxy and repository). Your share simply cannot keep up with the incoming data.

Thanks.

[jjohnson]

Thanks Anton. I will definately find that user guide and see if it is set up correctly. I am a little surprised that it would be my laptop hard drive. I had tried writing to my local disk, which is a SATA3 (6GB/s) SSD drive and then I have also tried a USB 3 attached SATA 2 HDD.

I will post again if there are any changes. Thanks,

[tsightler]

I have tried installing Veeam v.6 as a VM and saving backups locally, which works great. Except I do not have enough storage on the VNXe3300 to do that for all of my VM's. I have added a shared drive on my laptop as a repository and set my laptop as a Proxie. Now, if I try to use the laptop repository, my transfer drops to 4-6 MB/s. When I look at the realtime statistics, it says my bottleneck is the network at 98%. I have 40% network utilazation on my laptop and 2-9% network utilazation on the Veeam VM.

OK, I'll try my hand at some deductive reasoning based on the information provided. Let's look at the facts from your post:

1. Performance 4-6MB/s
2. Bottleneck is "network" at 98%
3. 40% network utilization on laptop
4. 2-9% network utilization on Veeam VM.

My conclusions is that the laptop NIC is running at 100Mb. Why? 40% of 100Mb is ~4MB/s. The "bottleneck" being network simply means that the "network" queue is pretty much full 98% of the time. The Veeam VM is fluctuating between 2-9%, thus averages is about 4%, which makes since as 4% of 1Gb = 40% of 100Mb = 4MB/s. The step down from 1Gb to 100Mb is a problem because the link is being flooded, causing dropped packets, which is leading to less thatn ideal performance, even for 100Mb.

Please verify that this is the case. If so, ideally you should attempt to get the laptop on a 1Gb network connection. If you can't do that, then I'd suggest you set traffic throttling between the proxy and the laptop repository to limit the speed at the application layer rather than relying on dropped packets to slow the link. You might also try disabling the "Use multiple TCP connections" in the traffic throttling options as well.