Backup Exec Speeds

[JessePAIT]

I have Backup Exec 2012 running in an environment to back up a couple physical servers and about 20 virtual servers running in a VMWare cluster with vCenter.

Backup speeds seem very slow.  400 to 550 MB/min seems to be the top speed that I will get.  Everything is plugged into GB ports on Cisco switches.

I turned off the "Checkpoint Restart" hoping that would make a difference but it didn't.

Here are my questions:

1)  Are there any other items I should check to try to improve speed?

2)  What are expected backup rates for servers connected to a GB network?  I thought I remembered getting 1.5 to 2 GB/min at my last job but maybe I'm just being crazy.    

Thanks

[CraigV]

Hi Jesse,

A lot depends on what data you're backing up, how it is configured, how your LAN is configured, times the jobs run and if they clash with maintenance jobs etc.

A couple of things you can try:

1. If you're backing up to tape, follow pkh's excellent article on tuning your tape drive:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/tuning-my-lto4-tape-drive

2. If backing up to disk, make sure the B2D (or dedupe folder if you use it!) is excluded from any antivirus scans.

3. Make sure that the AV, if installed, isn't perhaps scanning the BE services, and if so, put in exclusions for them.

4. Is this a file-based backup, using GRT, or just backing up the VMs using the agent?

5. Are your server and switch ports hard-coded to 1GB FULL? If not, do so and check again...

THanks!

[teiva-boy]

To get any decent speed from BackupExec, you MUST be backing up to decent and fast disk.  And you have to be writting a number of concurrent streams.  Tape with Backup is slow typically.

And 1GbE speeds are often not enough, you need to be trunking, or using 10GbE.

[JessePAIT]

I uninstalled the antivirus and it improved speeds some. I've narrowed it down to backups running very slow when I backup VMs through vCenter. If I just back up the VM directly it runs at a decent speed. Why would this be? I would like to get image level backups. I am backing up to disk, local storage and to Exagrid devices.

[teiva-boy]

Are you using SAN transport or NBD for the vCenter/VMDK based backups?

SAN is typically faster, NBD one of the slowest.  

If agent based backups are faster, odds are you are using NBD.  

However though, you do need more than 1GbE speeds on your backupexec server no matter what.