VEEAM is up and running in my environment - any advice on how to speed up my backups?

And, as Chris shares, you can add your Nimbles to Veeam (I do)...so you can utilize Backup from Storage Snapshots (BfSS); speeds don’t necessarily top much more than if you were using DirectSAN..and sometimes even when using hotadd as well. But, it does take load off your VMs from snapshotting.

Did you configure your Repositories to use ReFS or XFS?

Are you using DirectSAN Transport Mode?

Is your network connection a dedicated network for storage only?

You can look at the vSphere User Guide for Veeam (assuming you’re using VMware?) to see how to configure DirectSAN

You can also review the Best Practice Guide

Bottleneck on every job is “source”

Direct SAN is enabled and rocking and rolling 

we are reading and writing at 1gbps or more and it’s glorious

dumb question : anyone ever seen faster speeds?

if so, how?

thanks for all of the help and advice guys 

It’s trying to use DirectSAN, failing, then failing over to VMware Backup Proxy.

Now, depending on how “VMware Backup Proxy” is configured, that is your issue. 

For me, “VMware Backup Proxy” in this case would be a VM, if it was on the same HOST as the VM being backed up, it would use [HotAdd] and be quite fast. It essentualy mounts the volume then spits it out the 10Gb  port in the VMware host.

This is why multiple VM proxies (1 per host are recomended) are needed to go this route. If it isn’t on the same host it uses NBD.

It will also be using the VMware Management ports, with overhead in this case.

If you have 1 Gb management ports, it’s slow….. that speed is within the 1Gb range. 1Gbps = roughly 125MB (Theoretical max) 

10Gb = 1200MB so you will see around 1GB in Veeam.

Check your transport modes, make sure your proxy that you are using and VMware management ports are 10Gb networking.

What I do is thin provision everything on the SAN itself to save space, but create my VM’s thick provisioned. It’s a double bonus that they don’t expand and blow up the datastore too. 

thanks for the quick reply

Did you configure your Repositories to use ReFS or XFS?

ReFS is what everything is formatted for (that was recommended)

Are you using DirectSAN Transport Mode?1

Looking into setting that up, not sure how to do it exactly 

Is your network connection a dedicated network for storage only?

Verifying that now, this has its own dedifcated VLAN just for backups as well so the goal is to have it nearly fully separated from the rest of the network 

Install Veeamone Monitor helps diagnose the backup infrastructure and its hypervisor.
Do you use Vmware or HyperV?
Are the datastores FC, ISCSI, NFS?

Do you use virtual appliance mode?

Performance Bottlenecks - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)

regards

There was a ‘beat the Gostev’ challenge that Veeam ran, which saw a couple of submissions of over 100GBps. The winner was 147.7GBps, so Veeam does scale VERY well.

Make sure you’ve got Multipath IO enabled so that you can write to your Nimble via multiple channels. Are your data interfaces shared for access to Nimble and your production storage?

A diagram of your topology would be a good place to identify potential bottlenecks. There’ll always be a bottleneck but it’s got to be fast enough to meet your needs. I just did a deployment that was seeing 4-5GBps throughput per site, it was with a couple of HPE Apollos per site, with multiple RAID Controllers and RAID volumes per HPE Apollo, with 40GbE and 32Gbps Fibre Channel to read from production. The bottleneck is source! 😁

I dont know what happened exactly, but I went from 1gbps read and 950mbps write speeds to 80mbps write or even lowere

any idea why that might have happened?

 

My job also says “DirectSAN is not available failing over” but I have failover turned off

 

 

Hi @clownyboots178 

do proxies and vbr have access to proxies\datastores?

Have you set proxy-side direct storage access mode?

Backup Proxies -> VMWare Backup Proxy -> Transport Mode

and in the job check this.

ATTENTION.

Only the VM disks "Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed" and "ThickProvision Eager Zeroed" can be used in Direct SAN mode.

check this:

Direct SAN Access - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)

What is the source? VM, Physical server, Physical workstation, File server? how do you backup it; via Agent or agentless? if Agentless, what is the hypervisor? what is the datastore type; local disks (HDD or SSD), iSCSI, or what? 

If it is VM, where is the Proxy server installed? inside the Hypervisor or on Physical server?

So basically, Veeam needs to read the data from the Datastore VMs reside (snapshotting, etc). As such, I/O control can be configured to not allow Veeam unfetted I/O to read such data on your production datastores in which VMs reside.

How is the storage you are backing up from connected to the environment?  iSCSI or FC?  Might want to look there since it failed over to Network mode.  There is a connection to the storage preventing the Direct SAN access.