Bacula is very I/O intensive and right now that is not a very strong
point of virtualization. We run almost entirely VMware ESX here. When
backing up 5 machines at once I've noticed very poor performance as
well. When we pulled the SD off of a VM and onto a physical machine it
helped out a ton.

VMware server is far worse when it comes to I/O. I run it at home with
Bacula and when you peg a VM with disk activity it just crawls. The
other thing that you have to remember is that networking is all
virtualized and that creates a lot of overhead. Since each machine has
its 'own' adapter, and to keep things isolated, TCP offloading can not
be used. That means the CPU has to do all the networking.

VMs are really good at CPU and memory intensive workloads, disk and
network loads are getting better, but it requires the collaboration of
the hardware vendors to integrate virtualization into their products
like the CPUs.

Robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bacula-users-bounces AT lists.sourceforge DOT net [mailto:bacula-users-
> bounces AT lists.sourceforge DOT net] On Behalf Of Keith Sudbury
> Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 7:02 AM
> To: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
> Subject: [Bacula-users] Slow backup from VMWare
> 
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have a CentOS box running a LTO-3 SCSI drive and I am currently
> getting abour 7 / 8 MB/s from a Windows 2003SBS machine running on the
> CentOS box. This is the only VM on the box and the server has no load.
> 
> The box is a new Dell server of reasonable spec and has the Vmware is
> running in "bridged" mode for networking, the drive are SATA and
> confisured in a RAID5 (with a real hw card). I'm not expecting a
rocket
> but 7mb/s ???
> 
> I am wondering if any of you have experianced any thing simular?
> 
> 
> Many Thanks
> 
> --
> Keith Sudbury
> 
> 
> 
>
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