Backups have increased in time taken

[Ian_McGuinness]

Hi,

I am in the process of moving to a VMware environment with Windows2008 servers and a new install of BE.  I am in the process of upgrading from Win2003 active directory to 2008 and will be moving from Exchange 2003 to 2010 (but have not done that yet).

I am currently backing up the VM servers via agents and everything was going well.  It was taking about 7 hours to backup all of the data onto a tape library.  I was performing a full backup on Friday night and Differential backups on the other nights.

Last Friday i reset my admin password to get it to regenerate the keys(?) as i thought i might have an Active Directory issue and i was recommended to try that.  The password is still the same, it was just re-entered.

Now, my Friday night backups are taking 35 hours.

I am at a loss as to what could be the problem.

I have shutdown and restarted all of the servers involved, I have re-tested the resource credentials (all ok) and resaved the settings.  I have also run the BE_supportTool and found nothing note worthy.  Everything looks fine, it's just taking a long time to run.

Any thought as to what i can investigate next?

Thanks
Ian

[AmolB]

Check the alerts tab for any outstanding alerts.

[Ian_McGuinness]

Hi,

The Alerts tab is empty

[Sush---]

Try to take the backups on Disk and test if there is any changes in the backup time.

Thanks,

-Sush...

[CraigV]

...after resetting the service account's password in AD, did you do the same in BE itself? If not, give that a try, and then run a backup again!

[Ian_McGuinness]

I don't have enough spare disk space to backup the entire system to disk so i can't try that one.  I'm hopeing that they will approve a sata san in this years budget.

Where do i reset the password in BE?  I had a look arround but couldn't find an option.

I did recently apply the SP1 to Windows2008R2 to all of the servers (during the week before the full backups went nuts) and i have now found this thread (https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/be2010-slow-windows-2008-system-state-backup) where they are suffering simular time issues when backing up system state.  They say that Symantec know about the issue but are yet to provide a solution.

As a test last night i performed the full backup without system state and the backup dropped from 35+ hours to just over 3 hours.  That indicates that even when i thought everything was running well, 4 hours was taken up with system state backups.

Ian

[Sush---]

Well if your backups are getting slow down while backing the System State of Windows 2008 server, then this is the Known issue with the current version of Backup Exec .. (I am sure by now you must have got this information already). Refer to the following links for more details:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/issue/performance-issues-maybe-observed-when-backing-system-...

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH76051 : Slow performance may be observed when backing up the System State of a Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 Server and backups of other data from the same system is unaffected.

And the Good news is that the issue is fixed in the next release of Backup Exec which is due to be released in early April 2011.... not much time left. :)

Thanks,

-Sush...

[Ian_McGuinness]

Hi Everyone,

I understand that the issue is due to be fixed in R3(?) but i have been reading everything i can about the problem and looking at all of the options about possible work arrounds.  I tried this process (http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH70486) for "How to Re-register Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Components on Windows 2008" on all of my servers yesterday and ran a full backup overnight and it compleated in about 8.5 hours.  Not as good as it should be (4 to 5 hours) but better than the 35 hours it was taking before.

I look forward to better performance after the next release but atleast now i can backup.

Ian