BEWS 2010 R3 Dedupe - Slow Exchange and OS backups

[AB_Panthro]

I've been using VMware Data Recovery 2.0 with dedupe for a few months now, and think it's a great system.  Now we've commissioned our new Exchange 2010 and SQL servers, I decided to use Backup Exec to backup and dedupe them too.

I've noticed that on the OS drive on the SQL server, the transfer speeds are around 650MB/Min but on the data drive the speeds are 10x that at 4.8GB/Min!  The server has a full backup currently being performed on it using the Windows Server agent and SQL Server option.

A slightly different thing happens on the Exchange server.  Its OS drive is very slow too, around 616MB/Min but the drive with teh mail store on it is around 1600MB/Min.  The two mail stores on that server backup using the Exchange option (with GRT) at only 610MB/Min which is useless for me at the moment.

So I guess I have two problems - the first is that the OS drives on both servers backup very slowly.  The second is that the Exchange option seems to be slowing it down big time.

Any suggestions?  So far, I have split the backups into two jobs and moved from Media Server dedupe to Client Side dedupe.  Even after restarting services and leaving it for a few days, this hasn't improved the transfer speeds.  I'm not using AOFO on either job currently.

[CraigV]

Hi,

You're not saying which version of BE 2010 you're using, and if it isn't R3 it might be worth your while to upgrade to that.

Either way, make sure that your version of BE is fully patched, and that the media server has run a push-install to any remote servers you might have.

Once done, try the backup again.

Thanks!

[AB_Panthro]

Hi Craig,

I'm running 2010 R3, fully patched and the agents were pushed out to the servers after it was fully patched.

[AB_Panthro]

I switched GRT off this morning and ran a backup test of the message store and it ran at 2500MB/Min - looks like the issue is with GRT.

So now, any ideas how to troubleshoot GRT performance?

[CraigV]

You might want to check the links below for further information:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH126170

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH52120

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC3276

[AB_Panthro]

B2DTest was a good idea, so I've run that and it passed all tests so I can discount the storage device as the cause.  Will try the other 2 links now.

[AB_Panthro]

The reason given for this at the time by support was that the amount of data being backup up was small, so the "updating catalogs" phase of the job was skewing the performance.

I'm now backing up around 200GB but it's still just as slow as ever.

[AB_Panthro]

Oh and I upgraded to 2012 and that hasn't helped either!