How quick is VCB supposed to be?

[fontyyy]

Hi there, question as title;

How quick is VCB supposed to finish backing up a server to the proxy location?

I realise it doesn't really matter as it's just copying a snapshot but ours is very slow, maybe a 2gb file per hour, it also seems to take that amount of time even if it doesn't actually copy the file over. i.e. to save a VM with 20gb h/d space would take approx 10 hours whether the drive is full or not.

Performance of the ESX servers themselves is fine, performance of other drives on the SAN (an EMC CX3-10c) is fine, performance of my previous backup "solution" of esXpress was fine (even after it dropped to 2 VBAs throttled at 13MB/sec as we didn't pay for it), I only changed as we'd paid for VCB so it seemed a shame not to use it and the then installed version of esXpress didn't like esx 3.5, I realise the new version does.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong;

vcbmounter -h Virtual_Centre_Server -u administrator -p password -a ipaddr:fully.qualified.server.name -r file://server/share/folder -t fullvm

???

[kjb007]

You may want to try and using a local repository and see what kind of speed you are getting. The issue I see is that the vcb is not only serving as a proxy for the vm, but then using that data and then copying it to a share. Typically, you would run the image copy to local, back it up using some backup software, and then remove the image file.

In your case, I would use vcbmounter and copy it locally. Then run a copy job to copy it to the share.

-KjB

[fontyyy]

Well, initial impressions are that it's certainly better running locally, at least twice as fast. But hardly rocket speed.

[kjb007]

You may want to double-check your networking on your esx host and make sure the speed and duplex are correct and the physical switch matches to.

-KjB

[Phil_White]

If I'm not seeing it in your initial post I'm sorry:

Are you backing up to a network share via the network or a SAN directly connected to the VCB proxy? I do my backups directly to the SAN and it takes no more than 10 minutes for most of our servers.