cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Backup Exec 2014 AVVI GRT Catalog/Verify incredibly slow...

LozBC
Level 4

Hi,

I am posting this here and logging a case for it with Symantec in the hope that someone has a fix...

I am backing up a lot of VM's on VMware using NBD (Soon to be SAN Transport) with a target of a deduplication store located on an EMC VNX SAN attached via fibre.

Most backups are of fairly small VM's with no GRT option selected and these are fine...

I have two file servers which have 800GB and 1.2TB of data stored as VMDK's, for these servers I require GRT so I have enabled only Backup Exec GRT...

The backup for these two servers takes approximately 10 hours total... (2900 and 3200MB a minute throughput according to job log)

Then the catalog process begins and eventually I have to cancel it because it takes such a long time... In 7 hours it had cataloged approximately 200GB of data with a job rate of around 750MB a minute!!! What is really frustrating here is that the server does not appear to be doing anything... IO to the SAN as measured by EMC PowerPath is minimal...

Once I cancelled this the job then began a verify...

Somehow the verify takes 16 hours at 1765 MB a minute (So it is actually taking longer to verify the backed up data than it does to actually back it up?)...

Am I missing something here?

Basically a GRT backup of my file servers at this moment in time is pointless because cataloging the data is so horrendously slow... I saw BE 2012 had similar issues with large amounts of files on AVVI jobs but thought this had been resolved...

More detail:

Dell R710 with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5530 with 16GB of RAM running Backup Exec 2014 with all updates installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with all updates installed. Microsoft Forefront 2010 AV installed with Excluded files and locations set for the entire C:\Program Files\Symantec folder and the entire drive holding the deduplication store

2 REPLIES 2

ZeRoC00L
Level 6
Partner Accredited

I think this is 'normal' as BE need to index (catalog) the files that are on the system.

You can try Configure delayed catalog operations to improve backup performance:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO99624

LozBC
Level 4

Hi,

Yep fantastic...

Logged a call with Symantec and they said the same... so thanks to SAN Transport I can backup one file server (730GB) in approximately 2 hour 30 minutes to dedupe storage...

Only problem is I have to wait 19 hours plus in order for the GRT catalog to finish...

Delaying the catalog operation is not really an answer is it... it is just putting off the inevitable slowness...

I am running the job to an LTO5 which completed the backup in approximately 1 hour 30 minutes and the catalog has been going for 2 hours so far and is 3/4 complete so this looks the best I am going to get...

I (Like so many others have already) am probably just going to dump Symantec on next renewal...

Its just not worth the hassle...