Slow VM (avvi) Backup Exec

[mickelingon]

Hi

I'm doing a POC for a customer backing up VM .s on a ESX environment.
The problem is that the VCB export is VERY SLOOOOOOOW.
As soon as the export is done it pushes data to HP D2D with a speed of 1200 MB/min
But the overall speed over time is just poorly 133 MB/min

Is there anything you can do about the slow export?

the customer is also trying Veeam Backup with VCB and that reaches a speed of 300 MB/min
It's a 1 GB LAN
The BE server is not on the SAN (not in this POC) Will it make a huge difference if it is?
The BE server is a 64 bit windows 2008
The BE server is also VCB proxy (recommendation from Symantec)

Any thoughts on this?

Mikael

[mitchm3]

Note that Veeam is a "one hit wonder," only capable of backing up VMware environments.

You need to think bigger, and explain that to the customer.  Exchange GRT, Sharepoint, Active Directory, SQL, integration into the best email archiving platform worldwide


That said, sounds like a network bottle neck.  try jumbo frames and some TCP off-loading.  Also, is this an internal NIC, or an external PCI/PCI-X NIC.  Ideally it's on a dedicated PCI-E NIC...

[Symanticus]

Hi Mitch,

from: http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/other_resources/b-backupexec_12.5_faq_10-2008_69739.en-us.pdf

Expect entire Guest virtual machine recoveries to take longer than a backup, it make sense since the restore needs to be done manually using VMWare Converter Standalone 4.0.1

Hope this helps.

[mickelingon]

Hi

The customer already uses backup exec and will not get rid of it.
But they have some problem with their ´time window and want to run their VM backups with avvi.
I'm really worried about the time it takes to backup a VM.
And the reason we tried Veeam is to make a comperance. And it is faster. So the network is not really the issue. Even though it's quit slow, so we should check that as well.

Haven't had an answer to my question though.
Anyone experiencing the same problem with slow VM backups, especially the VCB export?!

Mikael

[seregmo]

Hello,
Having the same issue's here.
The export of the snapshot to the VCB proxy server is taking the most time.
A small VM with a 40GB virtual disk and approx 11GB data is taking about 45 min to backup, about 30-35 min of this time is consumed by the snapshot creation.
(VCB Proxy server is connected directly to the Fiber SAN)

What backup times are you having?

Marcel

 

[Symanticus]

Hi All,

I'm now at the stage of creating a backup strategy for my current vSphere 4 (2x ESXi + 1x vCenter Server + 1 iSCSI SAN), but at the moment the purple arrow (which is the NBD mode backup to the backup server is running very2 slow around 243 MB/minutes according to the Backup Exec result log.

and it took total of 55 hours to backup the whole VM inside my VMFS partition

for the VM which has got RDM partition attach into it, i can just make it a virtual mode so that the VCB v1.5 can do the snapshot and quiesce the EXT3 Filesystem.

Note: The network between iSCSI SAN andthe 2x ESXi servers are different subnet (see the color coding)
Blue cylinder indicates NTFS partition while the Black cylinder indicates the VMFS

Diagram:

The reason in using the NBD mode to transfer the VM backup is that to make the backup process to run faster without encryption but it turns out to be slower that what i thought, if anyone got a better solution in using SAN mode or even HotAdd mode please share your comments and suggestion here.

Thanks.

[JayG]

Just curious if anyone has found any tweaks to improve AVVI performance???  We are evaluating it in light of the special pricing Symantec has offered until 9/30/2009.

I baked up a 34 GB VM and it tookd 1 hr and 37 minutes.  We currently use another product, which backups the same VM in 44 minutes.

My Backup Exec 12.5 server is also the VCB product.  I have a 1 GB NIC connecting it directly to the iSCSI VLAN.  The VCB copying the snap to the C: drive takes forever!

Anyone using AVVI in an iSCSI environment?
Have you found any ways to improve performance?

Thank you!

[Symanticus]

Unfortunately not at this time :|

and I also looknig forward to hearing from you guys if there's a solution for this slowness issue.