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BE 2014 AVVI Restore speed improvement?

LozBC
Level 4

Hi,

A quick question... currently I am backing up my VMware environment using SAN Transport to LTO 6 tape library.

I am getting between 7000 and 12000 MB/min which is fantastic.

I believe due to a VMware limitation I can not use SAN Transport for restore of thin disks (And even if I could I am not sure if I would want a Windows box to have R/W access to my VMware LUNs...

I am therefore using NBD...

I performed a test restore recently and the performance was 3000 MB/min (This was running through vCentre - although I have tried direct to a host with similar results). This equates to approximately 50 MB/sec.

From an time taken to recover point of view I would like to improve this performance..

The BackupExec physical host has a 4GB LACP trunk connection. My vSphere hosts have 1Gb connections.

Firstly is the above restore speed typical or do I have another issue? I ask if it is typical because the theoretical maximum speed of 1Gb is 125 MB/sec so I am surprised to see it running so slowly?

I was also considering purchasing a pair of 10Gb NIC's and putting one in BackupExec and the other in one vSphere host and seeing if that improves things? Has anyone done this and can they give me any rough benchmarks for an NBD restore?

The other thing I was considering was whether it would be any faster to have a BackupExec VM and somehow utilize HotAdd for restores???

4 REPLIES 4

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

...you're forgetting that you're writing to disk from tape, so the theoretical speed of the NICs doesn't count there.

The write speed to disk depends on the number of spindles in a RAID set, the speed of those disks, and the RAID configuration as well. 

Thanks!

LozBC
Level 4
Hi, You are correct but in this instance I doubt this is the issue... Restoring to a 15 disk 15K SAS Pool using RAID 5 (3 x 4+1) backed with Flash Cache (EMC VNX)... Also if I restore the VMDK files to the BackupExec server locally on a RAID 0 made up of just 2 15K SAS disks the restore runs significantly faster...

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

...using pure iSCSI or NDMP?

Also, are you using GRT in your backups, in which case it will stage to disk first before restoring...if this is the case, check the location of the temporary staging location.

Thanks!

LozBC
Level 4

Hi,

Backup is using SAN Transport, restore is just plain over the network through vCenter.

Not using GRT in the backup either...

Thanks