Netbackup Hyper-V Host Resource Requirements

[joefreyatatado]

Hi All,

I would like to ask what is the requirements of hyper-v host when we will backup a VM. like (CPU, RAM, etc) I know it will use some resources while running a backup. We will try the hyper-v backup from a production server.   

VM Host - windows server 2012

Netbackup Master - 7.6.0.3

Netbackup Media Appliance - 2.6.0.3

Thanks. 

[sdo]

You should certainly be able to test, starting with one backup.  Any fairly capable Hyper-V host should be able to handler performing a Hyper-V VM level backup of a small-ish guest VM.

Because your test envrionment is the production environment, I would test out of hours, or at the weekend, and when no other backups are running.  And be logged on the Hyper-V host, and have taskmgr, resource monitor and perfmon already running - so that you can monitor the impact.  If you have a storage array with monitoring software, fire that up too beforehand - so that you can view the performance and resource demand of your test backup.

Remember to read through the CL for virtual environments:

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH127089.html

...and note how some of the CL information for virtualization is now in the SCL:

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH59978.html

...and the blueprint for NetBackup 7.6 for Hyper-V, can be found here:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/list-netbackup-blueprints

...and here are some notes re some things that I've noticed about Hyper-V VM backups:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/hyper-v-backups-including-deleted-blocks

[sdo · Accepted solution]

My advice is to start with one backup, and then slowly increase.  What I have noticed is that just running a few Hyper-V backups per Hyper-V host that the CPU and RAM are hardly touched, the issue, as ever is with disk throughput.  This is why it is quite important to have a good perfmon running, with the useful items being monitored such as read and write disk queues, read and write response times, read and write bytes per second, read and write average transaction (IO) size.  Don't choose the combined stats (i.e. the stats which are the combined read plus write) as you won'tbe able to distinguish the read traffic from the write traffic.

Will your Hyper-V hosts be purely clients?  i.e. not performing the backup write to disk or tape storage, i.e. not what might be termed SAN media servers?   Are they what would be termed 'Enterprise Client' i.e. purely forming the backup and sending over the LAN to a media server or storage server?  If your Hyper-V hosts will also be acting as media server and doing the backup storage writes, then you will notice more CPU and RAM consumption.

Pay careful attention to the fact that a Hyper-V VM backup with file indexing (i.e. allow individual file restore) will consume more NetBackup catalog space.