CPS Issues - Performance Tuning / Crashing

[Chuck_Graham]

First a brief description of my network. I have my CPS server located in a Colocation facility (T3) which connects to 38 branches offices (T1 or fractional T). Each branch office has a file and print server, we are using CPS to backup only the data (flat files) on these boxes. (We handle OS backups / restore, Exchange and Database servers under a different system.) 

Now for the problems.

1.  CPS simply is not "Greedy" enough to keep the servers in a dynamic state.  My CPS server is coasting on resources. Bandwidth, DISK I/O, memory and everything else is available in excess and is never anywhere near tapped out, it has a large SATA RAID array in a single partition for the backup data. But CPS frequently only has around 3-5 connections running at one time.  Rarely I'll see it up to about 16 connections and still my CPS server resources are fine.

A. How can I tune it to more aggressively maintain more connections?

B. Is there anyway to specify different throttling settings for different times? Would like to trickle at day and flood the pipes at night / weekends.

C. Any way to specify specific servers as high priority? I have 1 particular server that is critical that it should remain in dynamic but can find no way to force this issue.

2. CPS agent stops and doesn't restart at time of Snapshot. Now if I do nothing, it simply remains stopped and won't start up again on its own.  So I used the Microsoft recovery on the service to restart the service and reboot the box on the 3rd failure.  Not optimal but at least it keeps the server running. Also I rarely have more than 1 snapshot available which is annoying.

A.  Anyway to fix this problem?

B. Can't it make 1 snapshot of everything instead of 1 snapshot per (backed up) partition which it seems to be doing?  Would turning off the CPS snapshots and turning on snapshots of the backup drive itself be a workaround for now?

For flat file backup this product is good if I can just get past these last few hurdles.  We will maintain a seperate backup restore system for OS, Exchange and Databases until this product improves.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Message Edited by Chuck Graham on 11-09-2007 07:52 AM

[Roger_Sager]

G'day Chuck...

For your performance query...

I attempted a similar issue. I set up a number of difference backup jobs to protect each remote server. I setup a Daytime_server1 job that had throttled bandwidth set low and the job was to start at 7am and stop at 7pm (however, if the job was busy at 7 pm replicating files...the job would never seem to finish when the scheduler built into CPS issued the stop...so instead I used the cancel option (from the drop down in "When Schedule ends..." to stop the job at 7 pm). Then I would copy that Daytime job to a job named Overnight_server1 and it backs up the same selection but with more throttled bandwidth and starts at 8 pm (giving the Daytime job enough time to complete) and then a cancel time of 6 am. Both these run Mon-Fri, with yet another job called Weekend_server1 to run only on Sat & Sun with a difference throttled bandwidth or none at all.  If you get my drift...it is a lot of job setup, but the key is to have the job cancel (instead of stop) at the end of the scheduled time period.  There is no priority setting I have even come across. The only way to get creative in the throttled bandwidth (BW)...so a critical server could be set to have more BW then other. or better still have that critical server to be run in continuous mode.

On the CPS agent issue...

Well I don't have anything that will help, but I know snapshots of backup destinations are an issue...

The CPS snapshots have issues, but the best way I have found out so far is to direct snapshots to a difference physical disk then the destination of your backup locations. For example, if remote Server_A source is being backed up to disk D:\ on the target CMS/CPS server, then change the Shadow Copies location (via a tab in My Computer) for disk D:\ to another disk.  The idea is to have the snapshots go to any other disk then where you are backing up the remote server files to…

Hope that helps