What is downside to Network transport mode on Proxy?

[jamcool]

What are the downsides to using "Network/NBD protocol" with proxy servers over Virtual Appliance? I found this very written link (see below) with good and bad (ugly) of each. But is there is any other concerns with restores or backup sizes or doing encryption I should be worried about?

All of our VM Host are dual 10 Gbps and "all" traffic goes through them and they seldom do more than 1-2 Gbps except during Veeam backups which will get up to 3-4 Gbps. We have two clusters with each at about 500 VMs and about 170 TB of disk storage on each at about 80% space in use. With 5 dedicated proxy servers (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, VMXNET3 NIC) on each. Our bottleneck is always source (not proxy, network or target). Anyway, each cluster backup was taking 8-10 hours. Since going to Network for transport (a few days ago), we have cut each job time to under 2 hours and the backup speeds are higher and more consistent vs hot add that look like a sine wave.

My concern is what am I loosing (bad/ugly) by switching to transport mode.

On a side note this should fix my issue of proxy servers going invalid (see ESXi 6.5U2 and 3a patch entries in forums) doing the hot add for each VMDK to backup.

Comparing different transport modes
https://www.veeam.com/blog/vmware-backu ... ation.html

[foggy]

Hi Jason, if you see better performance with NBD mode, then no doubt you should go with it. Things like compression/encryption are not related to transport mode used by proxy in any way, so nothing to worry about.

[jamcool]

Thanks for replying back. I agree so far cannot find any downside. With backups so much faster that virtual appliance mode and our proxy servers not doing hot add and crapping out (going Invalid), life has been wonderful for last week. Not sure what do with all my free time now.

[foggy]

Set up a backup copy.

[bdufour]

Switched over to network transport a few years ago. Makes for backing up and replicating proxy servers MUCH easier! When a proxy runs hot add it can’t be backed up or replicated easily. Network transport over a 1gb or 10gb layer 2 Ethernet network works great honestly!

[nitramd]

Can you post the speeds you're getting with NBD?

[bdufour]

on my backups im getting btw 80-130ish mb/s processing rate consistently..network is never the bottleneck - this is all layer 2.
on my layer 3 offsite replicas - average of 2mb/s over a 20mbps mpls circuit - which is right on point.

[nitramd]

@bdufour, good information, thanks for posting.