Netbackup for VMware and Multipathing software

[AlGon]

Hello,

Netbackup 7.1.0.2

Windows 2003 Server Standard

Vsphere 4.1

SAN is fibre attached.

The Netbackup VMware backup host is a physical server that's zoned in to see all the Vsphere LUNs.

We’ve recently purchased a new 3par SAN, and will soon begin to migrate over our VMware guests from the old SAN.

However, when testing the VMware guest backups on this new SAN, we have a few issues.

It seems that once the 3Par MPIO multipathing software is installed on the backup host, the backup speed only manages to get around 3MBps .  Not only this, but it also fails to release the snapshot properly when the backup finally completes. 

As soon as I uninstall the MPIO software the backup speed returns to normal good speed, around 50 – 80 MBps (we backup to a VTL) and the snapshot closes off properly.

Has anyone else had this issue with the 3Par MPIO multipathing software or might have an idea why this is happening? 

[Douglas_A]

I have seen some issues like with this EMC's multi pathing software, we had the problem with win2k3 as well what we ended up doing was uninstalling the win2k3 MPIO software because it was causing issues.

Have you checked to see that the 2k3 install does NOT have native MPIO running?

[AlGon · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the reply, Doug.

It's seems one of the SPs had a damaged fibre cable. We have replaced this; it’s working fine now with the mulit-pathing software installed.

I'm still not sure why that without having the multi-pathing software it was able to backup fine, but at least the problem is fixed now.

.