VDP backup optimization

[viveks]

how to optimize backup time, deduplication, performance of appliance.

Thanks in advance

[schepp]

Hi,

1. Backup time:

to improve backup time I would deploy the VDP appliances so that the ESXi hosts where they run have access to the storage where the VMs run that are backed up.

If you have shared storage, the disk of the VMs will be mounted to the appliance and backup will only travel through your storage.

If your host has no storage connection to the VM, the backup will travel over LAN, which is quite slow.

2. Deduplication:

If you have multiple VDP appliances, I would take care that VMs that might offer good dedupe chances are backed up by the same appliance. Like backup all Windows fileservers with one VDP appliance.

3. Performance:

In my environment I experienced a great increase in appliance performance when increasing the hardware, especially the RAM of the appliance. My appliances have 4 vCPUs and 12GB RAM configured.

Hope this helps.

Regards

[viveks]

In my case using 2TB appliance 4 vCPU 8GB RAM. VMS are running from local storage whereas VDP running on Storage.

[snekkalapudi]

Optimize backup time:

• Let VDP leverage hot-add (The host on which VDP is deployed should be mapped all the datastores of other hosts from which VMs are backed up). This will significantly improve the backup time compared to backup over network
• Avoid storage migration of source VMs to the possible extent. Because every time a VM migrates to a new storage, VDP performs a full backup on the VM instead of incremental (This is something to do with CBT/Change Block Tracking - which loses track if VM is migrated to another datastore)

Optimize de-duplication:

• If your source VMs are of various guest OS and hundreds in number, then deploy multiple VDP appliance and dedicate them for specific OS type (Say VDP-1 for all windows backup; VDP-2 for all linux backup). This make sense if you have more than hundred VMs. Otherwise you are good with 1 VDP appliance.

Optimize performance:

• If you have enough disk space, choose thick provisioning while deploying VDP. This can improve write performance while writing backup data to VDP disks.
• Increase the compute resources(memory and vcpus) on VDP appliance. However the appliance defaults are tested for limits and scale.

Finally I would suggest to run performance analysis as a last step of VDP deployment(vdp-configure page) to get a performance report (Check this article to get an idea - VDP(vSphere Data Protection) 5.5 – Deploy & Configure – Quick Start | { ...)