Hi Steve,
Been there, done that with VMWare backups.
You can parallelize what you are doing now by installing multiple schedulers on
your proxy machine. Give it 2 (or more) node names (e.g., PROXYVCB1,
PROXYVCB2), install 2 schedulers, 2 dsm.opt files, give them each half the work
to do. (Also no reason you can't add more proxy machines.)
That will only help the Proxy client drive multiple full backups at once, it
won't improve the speed of the VCB fulls, which definitely have performance
issues.
VMWARE is addressing the VCB performance issue by replacing VCB altogether, so
you should be looking ahead to ESX 4.0 or 4.1 for a long-term solution.
In VSPHERE (ESX 4.0), VMWare has created a "Storage API" for their own backup
utility called VDR, and for 3rd party vendors to write to (VCB is still
supported in 4.0 as well).
I have a customer using VDR+TSM with success so far. Like most VM backup
products, VDR backs up only to disk. But it's part of ESX 4.0 Enterprise, it's
supported by VMWare, gives you incremental and fulls, and DEDUPS, so the disk
repository doesn't get all that large. It also thoughtfully keeps the sizes of
the resulting files in the repository below 2GB, at least as far as we've seen,
so we use TSM subfile backup to back up the repository and get stuff out to
tape and vaulted.
The VMWare world changes VERY fast. I went to a VMWare UG last week, and the
VMWare rep said 4.1 will be out this year, and will NOT support VCB at all any
longer. Thus my encouragement to move ahead to something that works a
different way. TSM 6.2 will be out in March, and will support the VMWare API.
I don't have any doc yet explaining exactly what it will do in practical terms,
but it won't be VCB.
..and congrats on the new gig.!
Wanda
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Steve Harris
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 6:18 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] VCB backup performance
Hi All
Thanks to all those that responded to my "time travel" query, testing is in
progress on that one.
One of my customers has an issue with a burgeoning VCB infrastructure.
There are two VCB proxies and a lot of VMs being backed up, TSM Server
5.5.3 and client 6.1.2. Most of this is a daily incremental and a monthly
full, but there are a couple of big file-servers with lots of small files
that get a daily full.
VCB backups are single threaded, and we are having trouble getting through
them all within the window. TSM doesn't seem to be the problem, we have
increased resourceutilization on the proxy without much effect. The
bottleneck seems to be the VMWare snapshot/mount/dismount parts of the
process, and there is not a lot of visibility of those.
1. Is there any good doc on this process and how to improve its
performance?
2. Can the proxy side be effectively parallelized, and if so how?
Thanks
Steve
TSM Admin,
Paraparaumu, New Zealand
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