Veeam Backup for Windows Performance.

Hi,

The requirements are quite generic and you need to review your individual bottlenecks to increase throughput.

The common bottlenecks are network & disk. Depending on whether you’re backing up a single endpoint with a 1Gbps NIC (or worse, Wifi) and a single SATA spinning disk, or a decent spec’d server with 10Gbps NICs and a performant RAID controller, are going to be very noticeable differences.

I’d start here. What are you backing up to? Is it based over the network, or is it a locally attached disk such as a USB 3 hard drive?

And what are you backing up from? A low-end disk or something performant?

Once you’ve got the utilisation of these devices, that’s where I’d look to see if they’re under performing. If you’re getting 100MB+ on a 1Gbps NIC, you won’t increase throughput without increasing the bandwidth for example.

Assuming that your disks & networking are being under utilised, I’d look at RAM next to ensure that nothing is being throttled by disk paging due to memory pressure, afterwards I’d look at CPU, if your CPU is the bottleneck, it could be genuine workload CPU demands, or it could be excessive compression, high & extreme compression tasks can saturate a weaker CPU fairly easily. Especially when you can feed the data to the CPU quickly with flash storage.

Hope this helps, if you’ve got further questions just ask 🙂

Don't forget firewalls and routers. I have seen sevral models that transferred at 1 Gb speed only and were a huge bottleneck in the network.

for me the basics are

• vm or server resources (specially Veeam Server and proxies)
• network speed / quality (enough bandwidth and speed)
• source and destination disks speed (from ssd to mechanical, don't expect ssd speed for example)
• then, many things, like @JMeixner and @MicoolPaul said.
• it depends…..
  
  cheers.

You definitely want to make sure you’re allocating plenty of system resources to your backup servers. Throw as much RAM and CPU at them as you can. The more cores you have, the more concurrent tasks you can accommodate as well!

I like to have, bare minimum, 32GB RAM and 8 cores in my backup servers. 64GB and 16 cores is even better!

If you are taking windows backups via snapshot method, then you need to ensure that the VMTools are installed for this machine. Additonally there is need of dedicated proxy servers to aid with backup. Also that the backup should go with hot-add transport modes. If its using other modes of transport, then kindly check with vmware admin if there is something that is blocking the connectivity amongst VBR, proxies, esxi datastores and disks of VM.

For agent based windows servers, ensure name resolution is working correct ( both fwd and reverse) ; ensure the bandwidth is not 1gbps and that other traffic is not flowing through same port ; enable jumbo-frames on the windows servers and ensure the network can accomodate jumbo frames as well.