Forum Discussion

Lambpix's avatar
Lambpix
Level 3
4 years ago

High IOPS VM Server Backup

Hi, I have had a question from one of our departmenst about backing up their public facing VM's using NetBackup, the servers have very high IOPS and they do not want to have any interuptions during ...
8
Linux
  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    4 years ago

    I concur with Marianne - your first port of call has to be resourcing the backup appropriately. Unfortunately VIPs don't deal with IOPS provisioning as such but leaving as much resouces as possible to the backup process.

    However, for a really high-transactional VMs with heaps of IOPS on its own exclusive datastore where no other VMs running, a VM stun - the effect when snapshot consolidation or removal takes place, can be a real thing. This is a feature of the current state of VADP and known to VMware.

    There is a solution in the works inhouse between Dell and VMware that will enable another API, from what I heard, initially available exclusively to Dell, that would deal with this issue. Not sure if it will be portable across all datastore types or just vSAN.

    Now what other people do as you might ask. The best solution to this issue so far is to do in-guest backup using agent, because the OS inside the VM deals with resource allocations so there will be no stun. Yeah, you won't be able to quickly restore the entire VM but it's the trade off.

Mouse's avatar
Mouse
Moderator

I concur with Marianne - your first port of call has to be resourcing the backup appropriately. Unfortunately VIPs don't deal with IOPS provisioning as such but leaving as much resouces as possible to the backup process.

However, for a really high-transactional VMs with heaps of IOPS on its own exclusive datastore where no other VMs running, a VM stun - the effect when snapshot consolidation or removal takes place, can be a real thing. This is a feature of the current state of VADP and known to VMware.

There is a solution in the works inhouse between Dell and VMware that will enable another API, from what I heard, initially available exclusively to Dell, that would deal with this issue. Not sure if it will be portable across all datastore types or just vSAN.

Now what other people do as you might ask. The best solution to this issue so far is to do in-guest backup using agent, because the OS inside the VM deals with resource allocations so there will be no stun. Yeah, you won't be able to quickly restore the entire VM but it's the trade off.

Lambpix's avatar
Lambpix
Level 3
4 years ago

Cheers Mouse, 

I think you maybe correct and going down the agent backup rather than the VM API route if they want to avoid any blip in the server.

 

Kev