Media Server limitation

[nbuengr]

Hi,

Is there a limit of nbu clients/policies for media server? Can a single media server accommodate large number of clients to backup?

Thanks.

NBU 7.7 running on RHEL 6.5

[RamNagalla · Accepted solution]

it is all depends on the Sizing of the media server and  like Memory, network, hardware etc..

please go through below technote to understand the desing requiremetns.

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000076282

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000076300

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

My 2c: There is no limitation from NBU point of view. The limitation is amount of data and physical resources. Bear in mind that a 1Gig NIC on a media server can at most receive data from clients at 100MB/sec. This is sufficient to stream 1 LTO4 tape drive. You need to start with a list of client names and amount of data plus backup window. Next carefully examine each component in the data path - from client disk, client NIC, network switch and settings, and lastly media server resources. More tape drives will not give better performance. Most media servers can at most keep 2 tape drives streaming at more than 100MB/sec (remember that NIC is normally the bottleneck). Please make use of the links in Ram's post. You may also want to read up in NBU Admin Guide I about media multiplexing from multiple clients.

[Genericus · Accepted solution]

It really depends on your architecture - what type network do you have? 1GB LAN? 10GB LAN? Fiber Channel connections? How many clients? How fast can they send data? Storage?

What kind of window are you targeting? Backing up once a week or every day? Physical systems or VM?

I know I got tired of several slower servers causing things to get bogged down, and went to an intermediate disk/VTL solution. I now can have as many backup jobs running as I can handle, and if I have a couple that write slowly, they do not prevent others from completing. then I duplicate from there to tape, the added advantage of increased throughput to tape allowed me to upgrade to faster tape drives.

I have 920 clients and 4 non-dedicated media servers, only 1 for VM, and 3 for LAN based backups. Any Oracle DB larger than 2TB has a dedicated media server connected via FC, but all data is written to tape via just two media servers.