Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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markuschneider
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Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by markuschneider »

Hello,

we have the following infrastructure:

Source: ESXI 3.5 Host with direct attached SCSI Storage and 20 VM's, 6 TB at all.
Target: vSphere 5 Host with vCenter, local 146GB RAID1 as datastore and a datastore FC SAN Fujitsu Eternus 12 TB
(24x 600GB SAS,twice 11x 600GB RAID 5 with HotSpare, means two RAID Groups at one Volume)

We try to migrate the VM's from Source to Target, but the transfer rate is under 20MB/s, mostly 13MB/s but also 8 or very rare 20MB/s.

First of all we had the problem that we always got 5-8 MB/s with a bottleneck on the source. But after installing a proxy on the source side (VM within Souce Host) we doubled the transfer rate with a bottleneck on network and target with 99%. We can see that on the source side VEEAM uses HotAdd, but on the target side it is only NBD, which means network mode. We would expect HotAdd on the TargetSide too, but when transferring from Source to Target we always get NBD.

This ist independent from:
Locating VEEAM/vCenter VM on SAN Eternus Datastore or not, having a Target Proxy or not. Also manual configurations (Proxy) didn't help. Further we thought of DNS as a problem, but after migrating a VM to the new Host/Datastore we installed a proxy and had no success in increasing the data rate.

We are wondering why we only get NBD mode on the target although we have a great infrastructure at all!

Please help.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Does your target proxy have access to datastores where replicated VMs are hosted?
rbrambley
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by rbrambley »

There is actually several things that could prevent virtual appliance mode from working, Veeam has a KB Article listing them all here - http://www.veeam.com/KB1054

My first reaction was that you have ESX 3.5 host in the mix too. There were several problems with hot-add before vSphere 4.0 U1 (I believe), but if that was the case you should be having trouble at the source site and not target. Maybe something else will jump out at you from the KB article first.
Gostev
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by Gostev »

To add to that - hot add may not be available depending on Windows OS version of target backup proxy server as well (this is covered in the Known Issues section of the Release Notes document).
markuschneider
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by markuschneider »

All over the weekend we didn't get a solution for this problem. The KB1054 article didn't help because there's nothing which led to our configuration. Regarding the Windows OS Version we tried 2003 Server SP2 and Server 2008R2 SP1.
May it be important which vSphere 5 version is running? We are using the Essentials Plus Kit, no Enterprise version.

Vitaliy, can you explain in detail what you mean with access to the datastores? The replicated vm's are on the FC SAN. I have no clue on how VEEAM proxy works inside, how to get access to the FC SAN. This should be only possible by connecting with a fibre channel adapter on the target proxy. Is this really necessary?
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by Vitaliy S. »

markuschneider wrote:May it be important which vSphere 5 version is running? We are using the Essentials Plus Kit, no Enterprise version
Essentials Plus Kit is enough.
markuschneider wrote:Vitaliy, can you explain in detail what you mean with access to the datastores? The replicated vm's are on the FC SAN. I have no clue on how VEEAM proxy works inside, how to get access to the FC SAN. This should be only possible by connecting with a fibre channel adapter on the target proxy. Is this really necessary?
In order to use HotAdd mode for writing VM data, your target proxy should be located on the host which is connected to all datastore you're replicating to.
markuschneider wrote:Target: vSphere 5 Host with vCenter, local 146GB RAID1 as datastore and a datastore FC SAN Fujitsu Eternus 12 TB
If this is your only target host which is connected to all datastores and your target proxy server is located on this very host, then VM data should be written via HotAdd mode.
markuschneider
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by markuschneider »

Vitaliy S. wrote:In order to use HotAdd mode for writing VM data, your target proxy should be located on the host which is connected to all datastore you're replicating to.
Ok, this is the case.
Vitaliy S. wrote:If this is your only target host which is connected to all datastores and your target proxy server is located on this very host, then VM data should be written via HotAdd mode.
It's not the only one because VEEAM itself reacts also as a proxy afaik. Anyway we have chosen the right target proxy within the job, so we also expected HotAdd mode. And we tried several proxies.

The project is finished for migration but HotAdd should also speed up backups. So I would like to find out the cause for this.

I guess I should open a ticket? What logfiles would be needed?
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Target on NBD instead of HotAdd

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Yes, just open the ticket and our support engineers will tell you which logs they need.
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