Veeam and Caching

[davejmurray10]

Hi All

A client of ours has a system in place and they are currently sitting at about 75% cache usage.

We use Veeam to replicate (daily) to a datacentre for backups and DR so don't use the snapshot feature.

They have a number of servers that are static in nature and with them being backend servers, they are only read from occasionally by internal services.

My question is, is it worth moving these to a non cached volume so the caching can be used more for the always accessed data as I assume the reading of these servers daily is putting data into cache. Could we use the cache in a better way for the more prominent production servers?  Or does the figure of 75% represent that this isn't an issue and data being read is cached.

Regards

Dave

[Valdereth · Accepted solution]

Great question 

Since you're working with VM's I'd move the virtual disks in question to their own Volume (using the same performance policy) and utilize InfoSight after a 30 days or so to see how much Cache churn is occurring on the Volume. In my experience Nimble has been great at putting important data in cache and prioritizing that when you start to near the limit of your cache capacity.  With the Cache Hit Rate in the Performance monitor and Cache Churn in InfoSight you can usually get an idea of what to plan for when dealing with worries like this.

They've also done a great job at picking up on the sequential nature of backup jobs and keeping those reads from polluting the cache.