Looking for Best Practices Guide for Veeam to StoreOnce NAS Share

[TroyPayne]

Hi, as the title says, i'm looking for a best practices guide or whitepaper for taking Veeam backups to a StoreOnce 5200 NAS share. I"m not using a Catalyst share for this backup.

As you can probably guesss performance is slow.

More details: Source vmware cluster is a 3 node SimpliVity 4000 Gen 10 cluster. So i'm doing NBD backups (Veeam BK server is a VM in the SimpliVity cluster and the veeam proxy object is set to "Network Mode").

Network is 10Gbps from source to target.

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. Notice: HPE MSA Storage - New HPE MSA Best Practices Part 3, Drive Firmware

2. Notice: HPE MSA Storage - New HPE MSA Best Practices Part 1 - Controller Firmware

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[Jyothiyash]

Hi TroyPayne, 

Please refer the links below, you may find it useful:

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00023056enw?jumpid=in_lit-psnow-red

https://www.veeam.com/wp-hpe-reference-configuration-storeonce.html

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/deduplicating_appliance_storeonce.html?ver=110

Regards
Jyothi 

[TroyPayne]

Jyothi,

thank you for the links.

Unfortuneatly those are all about configuring Veeam backups to StoreOnce Catalyst. My Catalyst backups are working great. 

My SimpliVity cluster doesn't support FC, so it cannot connect to a Catalyst share.  Veeam NBD backups over ethernet to NAS seems to be my only option.

For anyone interested....

Veeam backups over NBD (you configure the Veeam Proxy object to use Network Mode) use the ESXi host's management network. I have learned that VMware throttles the throughput on the ESXi host's managemnet links down to 40%. My links are 10Gbps so at best case I should see ~4000Mbps or 450-500 MB/s. I'm lucky to see 200MB/s.

[NarayanKK-SO]

@TroyPayne

There are no specific BP Guide for Veeam. But the general NAS suggestions are as follows.

NAS Guidelines
1 Configure multiple shares and separate data types into their own shares.
2 Each NAS share has a 1 million file limit, this includes all metadata files and backup images. Some backup applications create large numbers of small control files during backup to disk. Files smaller than 1 MB are not deduplicated. (Share version 2)
3 Disable software compression, deduplication and synthetic full backups.
4 Do not pre-allocate disk space for backup files within the backup application.
5 Disable any multiplexing configuration within the backup application.
6 Best throughput is achieved with multiple streams.
7 For NFS shares ensure the correct mount options are used to ensure in-order delivery and provide better deduplication ratios. See the HPE StoreOnce Systems Linux and UNIX Configuration Guide for specific details.
8 StoreOnce NAS is intended to be used ONLY by backup applications that ‘back up to disk’. Do not use the NAS target device as a drag-and-drop general file store.

Let us know if this helps. Also try referring the User Manual or Installation Guide for more details. 

Thanks,

[TroyPayne]

@NarayanKK-SO  Thanks for the tips.

Regarding points 3 and 6

"3 Disable software compression, deduplication and synthetic full backups."

Veeam has a "Dedupe-friendly" compression level that can be selected on the backup job. Or would you reccommend disabling compression in the Veeam backup job and let my StoreOnce be the only player doing compression?  My goal here isn't to save as much space as possbile on the StoreOnce, but rather it is to achive a faster backup time.

"6 Best throughput is achieved with multiple streams."

Can you elaborate on that a bit more?

[NarayanKK-SO]

@TroyPayne 

StoreOnce deduplication is recommended here. So disable the dedupe option from the backups SW side.

The streams are nothing but the number of channels used by the backups sessions. This option is avalable when you create a backup specification in Veeam. In most cases, it would be good to leave them in defaults as the SW decides the best option for it.

Thanks and Sorry about the delay