Hi,
I have 2 HP Proliant servers :
ML350 G5 : ESXi 4
ML350 G6 : ESXi 5
We are using an Iomega Storcenter ix12/300i as shared storage (SAN).
There are 5 VM's on the SAN, that are shared to the ESXi hosts via NFS.
Each ESXi hosts has its own direct gigabit connection to the SAN.
VM performance is okay. Clients can copy files to the SBS 2008 VM at nearly 100MB/s (full gigabit).
However when I run the ghettoVCB script to backup the running VM's,
I get around 40MB/second performance, on both hosts. (hosts are not backing up simultaneously)
The backup target is another directory on the same SAN. So bandwidth should not be an issue.
I calculated the transfer rate using the ghettovcb log file,by using the mentioned starttimes, endtimes and transferred MB's :
2013-06-26 09:02:00 -- info: Initiate backup for Bodet
2013-06-26 09:02:00 -- info: Creating Snapshot "ghettoVCB-snapshot-2013-06-26" for Bodet
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk '/vmfs/volumes/SAN_NFS2/Bodet/Bodet.vmdk'...
Clone: 0% done.
Clone: 1% done.
Clone: 99% done.
Clone: 100% done.
2013-06-26 09:07:13 -- info: Removing snapshot from Bodet ...
2013-06-26 09:07:49 -- info: Backup Duration: 5.82 Minutes
2013-06-26 09:07:49 -- info: Successfully completed backup for Bodet!
=> Thin provisioned backup = 16.272.440KB => 45MB/s
As all VMDK files of all VM's take about 3TB, we can't backup everything overnight (3TB @45MB/s = 19 hours)
Let alone copying these 'local' backups from the SAN to another NAS.
Anyone that has some pointers?
I tried enabling jumboframes on esxi hosts and SAN, but that made things slower.
I am using scheduled tasks with plink to initiate the backup at night.
Perhaps differential backups could be a solution, but for now we are using the free ESXi version,
so no budget here.
Thanks,
Thomas.