c7000 midplane speed

[MLDay]

Setup:
c7000 chassis
16 bl460c blades
14 ESX 3.5 hosts
2 Netbackup Media Servers

I'm backing up the ESX hosts via the media servers.

I need to know what the maximum bandwidth is on the midplane. My VMs are very slow during the back window.

Thanks in advance.

[David Claypool]

You're missing one critical piece of information, the interconnect. The midplane has dedicated traces from each of the server's interfaces to the interconnect bay downlink. The speed is dependent on the interface and the interconnect (i.e. if you have a BL460c G6 with Flex-10 but the interconnect only has 1GB downlinks, it's going to be 1GB). With different interfaces and interconnects, these same "lanes" will operate even faster (there are QDR Infiniband 4x mezz cards and interconnects that transport data at 40Gbps).

[rick jones]

Since virutal machines are involved, are you running paravirtualized drivers, or using fully virtualized? In addition to the interconnect question from David, I'd wonder about the CPU utilization of the stack.

[MLDay]

I'll check to see what interconnects we are using.

We are fully virtual as well.

Thanks

[Adrian Clint]

And also need to look at the routing of the backup traffic.
Eg if the Media servers have a NIC on the backup VLAN on NIC2 and the ESX servers backup NIC is NIC1 and there is no cable between switch1 and switch2 then the traffic will have to go up to another switch and down again.

I used to spend a lot of time when I was a Netbackup Consultant trying to identify the route where the backup traffic actually went vs where the customer thought it actually went.