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Data Protection designed for VMware: Resource limits?

JustineVelcich
Community Manager
Community Manager
Employee

The following customer question came in via Linkedin:

"What do I need to know about Resource Limits? And how can resource limits help me speed up my backups?"

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

JohnHink
Level 3
Employee

Resource limits are performance configuration variables that can be set in order to control how much of a specific resource is used. Set these limits to avoid overloading a particular resource. Making sure that resources are used at their optimal level will keep them functioning smoothly and give you optimal performance.

The two most commonly discussed limits are ESXServer and DataStore. With ESXServer, limit the max number of backups per ESX server. This is useful to avoid overloading the ESX server with a lot of simultaneous backup jobs. DataStore does the same, but jobs per DataStore. For example, if you can see that when backups are running, the DataStore is overloaded, it is the bottleneck. Use the resource limit for DataStore to make sure that the jobs are limited to a load that the DataStore can handle.  ESX Servers can have multiple datastores as well, so keep that in mind. Limiting the number of jobs per datastore might still overload the ESX server if you have 30-40 datastores. You might end up with a setting of 10 for ESXServer because that's that server's resource threshold.

For more details, check the Best Practices in the VMware Admin Guide here.

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1 REPLY 1

JohnHink
Level 3
Employee

Resource limits are performance configuration variables that can be set in order to control how much of a specific resource is used. Set these limits to avoid overloading a particular resource. Making sure that resources are used at their optimal level will keep them functioning smoothly and give you optimal performance.

The two most commonly discussed limits are ESXServer and DataStore. With ESXServer, limit the max number of backups per ESX server. This is useful to avoid overloading the ESX server with a lot of simultaneous backup jobs. DataStore does the same, but jobs per DataStore. For example, if you can see that when backups are running, the DataStore is overloaded, it is the bottleneck. Use the resource limit for DataStore to make sure that the jobs are limited to a load that the DataStore can handle.  ESX Servers can have multiple datastores as well, so keep that in mind. Limiting the number of jobs per datastore might still overload the ESX server if you have 30-40 datastores. You might end up with a setting of 10 for ESXServer because that's that server's resource threshold.

For more details, check the Best Practices in the VMware Admin Guide here.