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Nickylodeon
Contributor
Contributor

Excessive traffic between VDP and vCenter Server

Good day to every one,


I have a matter that i hope some one could shine some light on.

I found some traffic between vDP and VC that could total to 2GB in a day.


vsphere enviroment - 5.5 upgraded from 5.1

One VC, One vDP

VC managing the rest(ESX/VMs/vDP) over and 512mb cross-site wan line.

I understand that vDP doesn't go thru VC to perform backup; maybe sends logs and some basic configs to VC. So, whats all that traffic going on btw VC and vDP? even if the enviroment is much larger, the bottle-neck should still be on vDP-ESX-storage.

As you noticed that the WAN line is small, in this case, 2GB in a day over WAN is a concern.

Thank you

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12 Replies
snekkalapudi
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

What transport mode the VDP is leveraging ? (NBD or (SCSI)Hot-Add).

VDP chooses the transport mode depends on how datastores are provisioned(shared/non-shared) across hosts.

To be simple, The host of which VDP is deployed, if it has shared access to all the datastores on which VMs(VMs to be backed up) are hosted, then VDP would leverage SCSI-Hotadd (Which would avoid lot of network bandwidth)

If the datastores are not shared then it will leverage NBD (Backup over Network - which would consume network bandwidth)

-Suresh
vgorpen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have a similar problem. Host, VDP and NAS for backup are located in the first lan. Vcenter is located in other lan.

But the traffic between VDP and Vcenter (3-5 Gb) observed while no backup occurs.

VDP links to https port on VCenter. VDP receives 3.4Gb and transfers 1 Gb.

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jhunter1
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

vgorpen - What version of VDP are you using?

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vgorpen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VDP 5.8,   ESXi & Vcenter Appl 5.5

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jhunter1
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Thank you. I have asked an engineer to take a look at this thread and comment. Please note there is no SLA on when responses are delivered as engineers are quite busy. Smiley Happy

I also recommend opening up a low priority VMware Support Request (SR). Perhaps this is something they have seen before and can provide an answer.

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vgorpen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you. I'll reinstall VDP tomorrow. If it will no change the situation, I'll write to support.

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vgorpen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I reinstalled the VDP. It looks like it has not improved.

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LeslieBNS9
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm not sure if this is relevant or not. But we had an issue with VDP causing our vCenter to crash. We have 15 VDP appliances. It ended up being the VDP 5.8 opens sessions to vCenter but never closes them. So eventually all of the memory would become consumed and vCenter would crash. I wonder if the network traffic you are seeing is related to this bug. The bug I was told is resolved in 6.0. We've been running 6.0 so far without issue over the last week.

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vgorpen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I've updated VDP to 6.0.

Today (0:00-13:00) traffic between VDP and VCenter is over 1 GB with no any useful activity.

No changes (((

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jkoebrunner
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

We are experiencing the same issues.

Since vCenter communicates with our ROBO site via WAN, we experience traffic peaks every 40 seconds caused by the VDP appliance.

We only do the backups locally on the ROBO site without backup replication to another site.

So it must be the management or heartbeat traffic.

We have already opened a SR (15631016403) but the service technician only says that we need a 1Gbit/s link between vCenter and the VDP for heartbeating.

I cannot not imagine that this requirement is true. I have also not seen any of this in any VDP requirements document.

Please help, this has a major impact on our production network between the sites.

vCenter: 5.5 (2001466)

VDP: 5.8.1.7

BR Johannes

Johannes Köbrunner IT Solutions Architect Virtualization, Network and Storage Systems Frequentis AG VTSP, VCP, VCAP-DCD
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jtmoree
Contributor
Contributor

It has been a year since this post.  Has anyone been able to find any definitive information on this issue? 

I am attempting to replicate with VDP 6.1 but do not have a vcenter server at the remote site and suspect that registering VDP with vcenter over the WAN will not work.  This discussion suggests that I am right.

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dhanarajramesh

make sure below settings are correct, 1) dedicated VLAN for vcenter,esxi,VDP backup proxy managemnt connection 2) dedicated VAN for Backup Network between esxi,vdp proxy, backup servers 3) due to limitation make sure,this point:  HotAdd cannot be used if the VMFS block size of the datastore containing the virtual machine folder for the target virtual machine does not match the VMFS block size of the datastore containing the proxy virtual machine. For example, if you back up virtual disk on a datastore with 1MB blocks, the proxy must also be on a datastore with 1MB blocks.

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