Speed issues with restoring over network

[racksrv]

Hi Guys,

I have a teething issue that I can't get to the bottom of and its driving me mad, I'll try my best to explain the situation.

1.) I have a Xen VM running Windows 2008 Std 32bit and this has been setup with WDS to run a PXE boot server for the network and this VM also has a network share with a bunch of images I have pre-built for imaging. The VM has a Gbit virtual NIC which I've tested can do at least 50MB/s and thus is definitely working at above 100mbit speeds.  The Xen VM runs from a Supermicro server with Gbit LAN and connects directly to the switch serving our network.

2.) I have a blank Dell R200 server connected to the same switch as above and whilst the server has a gbit interface, I have changed the switch config for its port to 100mbit.

3.) When booting via PXE I am able to load the Backup Exec .WIM file no problem at all and get a minimum of 6-8MB/s throughout the 180MB transfer.

4.) The latest network and chipset drivers for the Dell R200 have been injected into the .WIM so Backup Exec has no problem at all detecting that the Dell R200 has a Broadcom NetXtreme network card and is able to lease an IP from our DHCP server without a problem.  What is odd though is that BackupExec shows the servers port speed as auto-neg'd at 1000mbit whilst it's actually 100mbit and I am unable to change this (I get an error).

5.) I can select the backup I want to restore without any issues but when it gets to the actual transferring of the image, I notice very poor speeds on the PXE server as you can see from this screen grab: http://axerite.com/jing/2011-02-07_BE_Slow.png

6.) If I change the switches port config for the Dell R200 from Auto-100 to Auto-1000 the speed of both the .WIM download and the image transfer jumps to 14-16MB/s as per http://axerite.com/jing/2011-02-07_BE_Faster.png which is obviously a vast improvement but still not as fast as it should be when running at gbit!

What could be the problem guys? I want most of my servers connected at 100Mbit and not Gbit but I can't be waiting hours for a 2-4GB image to transfer across!

Thanks, Jon

[racksrv]

*bump*

[Markus_Koestler]

Maybe you could tweak the settings of the SRD  ?

[racksrv]

Hi Markus,

Thanks for your reply, can you suggest where I can read up on this / how it's done as I'm unfamiliar!

Regards, Jon

[Markus_Koestler]

Hm, I think the XML file you need to edit is called autonetwork.xml or something like this. You need to open the WIM file that is on the SRD.

[racksrv]

I see a file called 'AutoNetwork.xml.disabled' should I rename without the .disabled?

p.s. I sent you an email a few days ago, I hope you don't mind (and hope you recieved it!)

[Markus_Koestler]

No sorry I did not get an e-mail from you, but I also stopped receiving the forum notifications, so I think our spam filter is not working correctly.

Yep give the rename a try and have a look at the content, maybe you could tweak some settings there.

[racksrv]

There doesn't seem to be anything useful in there I can change:

            <Property Id="AdapterGuid" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="AdapterIndex" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="IpAddress" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="Subnet" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="Gateway" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="Dns" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="PathToMap" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="DriveLetterToMap" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="UserName" Value =""/>
            <Property Id="Password" Value =""/>

p.s. would my email was regarding a request for some BESR consultancy if you are interested?

[Markus_Koestler]

Hm, then you might be able to set some properties using WMI or directly in the registry when the SRD is started ?