Quantum Forum for DXi V5000
Best Practices For vmPro Backups
I'm wondering what the best configuration is for backing up a number of VM's via vmPro if there is limited network bandwidth available.
I have 3 vSphere 5.1 hosts, one of which is running vmPro and a DXi v1000, with the intention of backing up VM's located on the other two vSphere hosts. All are connected via 1GB connections. The data storage for the v1000 is a NAS located at our offsite facility which is connected via 1GB fiber.
If I were to place 5 VM's into one folder in vmPro, does vmPro copy the data from the VM's sequentially, or does it fire off 5 copy jobs all at once, and all copy jobs are fighting for bandwidth?
Should I place all VM's into one folder in vmPro with one scheduled time for backup, or would it be better to create five separate folders so that I can have five separate schedules? Does it even matter?
Any thoughts on best practices on using vmPro to back up a number of VM's when we don't have a lot of network bandwidth and slow data storage would be appreciated.
Thanks....
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by DoubleDensity on
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In the current release of vmPRO 3.1.1, the default settings are set to execute up to two backup policies (tasks) simultaneously, with a maximum of four streams per policy (one stream is used to copy each individual VMDK disk)
If you were to put five VMs in a folder and backup that folder, you would see that four VMs would start to backup immediately, with four simultaneous streams writing to the DXi. It would then work sequentially through each disk attached to those VMs, and once a VM is complete it would move to the next one in the folder.
These default settings are designed to give optimal performance when using 1 gigabit LAN infrastructure, but they can be adjusted upwards or downwards using the following registry keys to fine tune for your environment. Here are the commands you would use from the vmPRO CLI -- in this example we are setting the default values:
vmPRO> reg set smartmotion.max_tasks = 2
vmPRO> reg set smartmotion.max_streams = 4
Since your DXi V1000 is in the same local environment as the vmPRO, these settings are probably pretty close to optimal.
From a best practices perspective however, the storage for that DXi V1000 would be in the local environment as well. Generally speaking to cross a WAN link to another facility the most efficient method would be to utilize DXi replication since it is specifically designed to deal with lower bandwidth and higher latencies, as well as minimizing the amount of data which needs to be sent.
In that type of setup you would have your local DXi replicate to a secondary DXi running at the other facility -- then after the initial full backup and syncronization, from that point forward the two DXi will only exchange unique deduplicated data blocks over the WAN link after each vmPRO backup. This will help to mitigate the bandwidth constraints and sending data to the offsite facility.
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