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X2's avatar
X2
Moderator
27 days ago

Control number of VM backups running concurrently

We have been using the "Resource Limits" feature to control the number of VM backups which run concurrently for years. The backup host (media server) is a Windows 2016 server/NetBackup 10.4. Over time the free space on C:\ has gone down due to Windows updates. This is causing some backups to fail when free space on the media server goes down to less than 1GB at a certain time during the night.

From investigation, I discovered that the backup policies which backup VMs on a particular cluster are respecting the resource limits. But there are a 3 policies where we backup some VMs which are exceptions, e.g. once a week full backup only, or backup OS disk only, etc. 

The fact that non-cluster VM backup policies may have VMs on any host or datastore, causes a lot of backup jobs to start simultaneously. This causes sudden usage of disk space on the media server.

I have tried to use the "Jobs per policy" to control the number of concurrent backups but it does not seem to have affect. Has anyone tried that? Any other way of doing this?

I set Jobs per policy = 21 (1 parent job, 10 snapshot and 10 backup jobs); but I still saw 24 backup jobs start for that policy between 6:30:18 - 6:31:03 (45 seconds).

  • X2's avatar
    X2
    Moderator
    27 days ago

    kiyan Thanks for the pointer. I have VMware resource limits working well for backup policies which run for a cluster. From the manual, I discovered that the "Jobs per policy" only controls the parent (discovery) jobs which run run simultaneously for the policy. Hence, no control over the snapshot/backup jobs.

    I will try to change the schedule of the problematic policies to spread them out so that they don't over lap with any other VIP schedule.

    Need to contact account team to request some kind of feature to control jobs on a media server for VIP.