Backup & Recovery

 View Only

  • 1.  Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 08:01 AM

    Hi,

    Running Vsphere 4.1 and VDR appliance version 1.2.x.

    * Data SAN: Dell equallogic PS4000XV (16 15k rpm SAS in raid10).

    * Dedicated VDR storage; Dell MD3200 (11 1TB 7.2k SATA in raid6 + 1 hot spare).

    I only see a speed of about 1 to 5 MB/s, although short bursts of 20 MB/s or so. On the VDR san, I only see around 50 IOPS, and on the main SAN there's a total of about 40 read and 200 write IOPS.

    I have been testing the SAN using dd on VDR, and I get around 90-100  MB/s, I've done the same on the data SAN on one of my virtual machines  and I do get close 100 MB/s there too.

    I also see a lot of "task terminated unexpectedly" in VDR event log, "possibly due to a power failure or system crash", so the VMDKs that are + 150GB never completes. This indicates a problem with VDR, yes?

    How should I start to investigate this further, or should I first try to find a more recent VDR?

    Also, I did initially use a 128 KB segment size of the VDR SAN. thinking "the larger the better!", but as it's an dedpulication store I have been thinking that a the segment size perhaps should correspond to the block size of the VDR ext3 partition instead (segment size / amount of data disks = close to 4KB)?



  • 2.  RE: Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 08:27 AM

    I did lower the "MaxRestoreBackupConcurrency" from 8 to 3, and then down to 1, in order to get a initial copy of every virtual machine.

    Mixed success, the three largest virtual machines are still not being backed up until interrupted.

    Using a 24/7 backup window.



  • 3.  RE: Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 01:35 PM

    Did an upgrade to VDR 2.0, the initial integrity check took way to long (32 of 100 000 0006 in three hours), so I deleted all the data and started over again.

    VDR now runs in 36-60 MB/s.



  • 4.  RE: Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 01:50 PM

    Yup VDR 2.0 MUCH improved..it's about time, only took VM Ware 2 years to get back to ZERO.. VDR still lacks many features but at LEAST I am not threatening to leave ditch VM Ware over it :smileyhappy:



  • 5.  RE: Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 02:18 PM

    RParker, any comment to the question below?

    "Also, I did initially use a 128 KB segment size of the VDR SAN. thinking  "the larger the better!", but as it's an dedpulication store I have  been thinking that a the segment size perhaps should correspond to the  block size of the VDR ext3 partition instead (segment size / amount of  data disks = close to 4KB)?"



  • 6.  RE: Slow VDR backups, and sometimes terminated?

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 02:22 PM

    3molo wrote:

    RParker, any comment to the question below?

    "Also, I did initially use a 128 KB segment size of the VDR SAN. thinking  "the larger the better!", but as it's an dedpulication store I have  been thinking that a the segment size perhaps should correspond to the  block size of the VDR ext3 partition instead (segment size / amount of  data disks = close to 4KB)?"

    De-duplication uses small block, so probably better to use 4KB, but since you created 128KB blocks it seems to be fine.. only thing that may happen is you end up using a bit more disk space.. but in the grand scheme, probably not much anyway.