File Copy is very slow

Hmm...agree with Scott here. Shoudn’t take that long. I’m wondering @GHuber ..do you have a Backup Proxy configured, as well as a Cache Repository? See the diagram of how File Backup works here.

Well that is relevant, as if you choose the wrong transport mode it can use the VMware Management network which is often slower on most hosts.   

It looks like this is your homelab, but the community will try and help you, these issues get resolved very fast when you have a support contract.

Unfortunately, there are many things that could be the issue. You said same physical disk. Is this an SSD, NVMe, or slow disks? how many VM’s are running on this disk, or raid group? if you are running VMware, File servers, Veeam, and doing heavy copies, this could actually be a disk issue and not even your network. Have you looked at the resources from VMware, from within the VM? disk latency using performance monitor could indicate many things as well. 

• let’s say ‘the files are copied from one raid-system to another one, both are located in the same ESXi-Host”

 Are they copied from 1 raid group to another? When you stated “Lets say” I just want to confirm this is actually happening.  Even so, I’d still recommend checking all the resources and disk latency / I/O, and making sure that isn’t the issue.

99% of the time the issue is config. Veeam will saturate my network / fiber usually as long as you keep throwing tasks at it. Concurrency is key.

if that is 160k files, that’s a lot of small files. the average file size is approximately 1.125 MB. You are going to be doing lots of reads and writes on those disks adding to the time. Try zipping a bunch of them and seeing if the performance increases. 

Have to agree with Shane here as best practice is to add another server to be the Proxy and not the VBR server itself.  Allow it to do its job of just controlling everything.  Also when adding a proxy for file shares select this type -

Good point & good catch Michael. In re-reading his original post, I think he does make it clear it is indeed a File Copy, not a File Backup.

I have to agree with the above, Veeam’s "File Copy” feature is an overly complicated way transfer some files. It may be simpler from a user perspective to do that if it’s convenient, but as far as the software that's doing it is concerned, it's far more complicated than just a basic Windows Explorer file copy, which is probably why it’s taking so much longer. If you must use Veeam, use something else (PowerShell, Windows Explorer, 7-Zip) to ZIP the files first, so Veeam only has 1 actual file to transfer, then you won’t be slowed down by Veeam’s overcomplication of the file copy process so much and it’ll come down more just to data transfer speeds on the hardware.

Hi @GHuber -

I’m just following back on your file copy post. I just want to verify one of the above comments helped you answer the slowness of your file copy process? If so, we ask you select which comment best helped as ‘Best Answer’ so others with a similar question who come across your post may benefit.

If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Thank you!

You did it correctly. 😊 Thank you for following up.