V6 - VMWare DR licensing

[fvhadrien]

Hello fellow Veeam users,

I'm having an issue using v6 with performance issues regarding replication to our DR site. More specifically, I'm trying to convince our company that we need v5 enterprise licensing at our DR site to support virtual appliance mode.

Currently we have a production site with three ESX 4.0 hosts with Advanced licensing. Local backups are very fast since we have an EMC FC4 SAN directly connected to our ESX hosts via HBAs. Virtual appliance mode works great. At our DR site, we have two ESX 4.0 hosts with standard licensing...Same storage connection. 9MB connection behind Riverbed WAN optimization. Our veeam server is a virtual machine setup as a backup proxy using virtual appliance mode. We have one other backup proxy on an ESX host at our DR site.

Since our DR site doesn't support hot adds, we are seeing pretty horrid replication times...Calculating digests takes forever simply because we're running in network mode. Keep in mind I'm only seeing this when recreating v5 jobs to v6 with replica remappings. Am I right to assume that we need to get v5 enterprise licensing for our DR site to allow hot adds on the backup proxy at the DR location or do I have something misconfigured? The hurdle I have is Veeam v5 doesn't have any speed issues in our environment since everything is processed on the local veeam server.

[Gostev]

Hi John, you definitely have something misconfigured as hot add does not require any special licensing. Make sure you have DR site proxy doing the calculation (change target proxy selection from Automatic to specific proxy). Make sure the proxy is using hot add (select the VM in question in the real-time statistics, and see what the log says). Thanks!

[fvhadrien]

Thanks for the response!

The vSphere logs blatantly say my license doesn't support the hot add feature when manually setting my target proxy to a VM at our DR environment. After checking with VMWare's version 4.0 license model, it looks like the hot add feature is only available in Advanced and above.

If that's a limitation with the new version since Veeam shares it's processing between backup proxies, that's fine. I'm actually just looking for some affirmation that my configuration of the replication job isn't wrong so I can present that to our committee. If I'm using the local veeam server as my only backup proxy for both source and target, I noticed that for the source proxy it's using virtual appliance mode but for the target proxy it switches to NBD. My backup proxy is set only use virtual appliance mode...never failover to network mode.

Does that make sense?

[tsightler]

Have you applied at least update 1 to your ESX 4.0 hosts? The original, non-U1 releases of ESX 4 required at least advanced edition for hotadd.

http://www.vnotion.com/?p=231

[fvhadrien]

That is very nice to know...Is hot add available in ESXi v5 standard licensing as well? If VMWare offers that feature in standard, I wonder why they don't include it in their version matrices...

To answer your question, we're getting ready to upgrade to ESXi v5...Our ESX 4.0 hosts haven't been updated since we got them. We've never spent the time. I'm embarrassed.

[Gostev]

Yes, SCSI hot add works with any ESXi 5 license level (except "free" ESXi 5).