Ultra slow Agent-Backup from VM

Hi EDV

What I would suggest is copying some of the files from your VM to the backup destination through explorer to ensure you do not have a network or HDD bottleneck on the files being backed up (eg, it could be very bad defragmentation of high HDD access on the RAID if you have many small files being accessed.etc). I would also suggest checking the CPU usage of the server as by default Acronis will use compression and if your CPU on that server is very highly utilised this will also slow down your backup performance substantially.

I would also suggest looking into using Image based backups in place of file level backups as they can be allot faster and Acronis also gives you the option of excluding folders with their image backups. When performing an image backup you can still restore files from these archives.

Hi Datastor Australia,

thank you very much for your response. I have run some tests and analysis on my machines, results here:

Explorer based file transfer from virtual Windows Server 2003 to physical Windows Server 2008 R2 does not exceed 15 seconds transferring 700MB iso file.

Physical HDD fragmentation is insignificant, due to brand new hard drives. The virtual hdd fragmentation is insignificant as well.

CPU usage is less than 20% average on 4 virtual CPUs.

Since I have no external storage available, except the ML350-Server with 1TB NTFS HDD-Capacity, there is no chance to provide any LUN storage to ESXi or the Acronis VM Appliance, since CIFs are not supported by VMWare. So how can image based backup from VMWare ESXi 5 VMs can be done with ABR11?

Overall vSphere performance monitorings shows no noticeable bottlenecks in idle mode as well as during backup procedure.

Edit: Some additional info on t he the hardwarespecs of the ESXi: 32GB Ram, 8x 300GB SAS 15K Drives, 4x Dual Core AMD Opteron 8220
Also, we just found out that ABR11 requires the vStorage-APIs-Feature, which is not a licensed feature of the "free" ESXi 5.0, so VM-Backup via ESX-Agent is at the moment impossible, except in 60Day-Trial-Mode.

Best regards

Hi EDV

Thanks for the update, very interesting...
Just wanted to make sure I understand correctly this is your currently setup:

HP ML350:
- Windows 2008 R2 Physical Server
- ABR11 backup server (Management server, Storage Note..etc)
- Destination Vault (Managed, unmanaged or are you using a UNC network path as the destination?)

HP DL585:
- ESXi 5 Host (Free edition)
- VM running Windown 2003 (ABR11 Windows Agent installed inside Windows VM)

Extra Details:
- With your backup plan are you using a disk/volume backup or File level backup?
- If you copy a folder with allot of small files to the backup server what speed do you get? (Eg, could there be anti-virus causing speed issues or a I/O speed issue perhaps)
- Transferring a single large file of 700MB file in 15 seconds is not too bad (around 46MB/s), but it’s also not overly fast either for the hardware you have in place I would have expected slightly faster but with other VM’s running and I/O in place this could be the reason for the lower than expected speed.
- If you are currently backing upto a vault please try to setup a network share (UNC path) and try to run a backup directly to this path to see if you might have a vault/storage node performance issue..
- Please check if you are using a Managed vault that it does not have deduplication enabled as if it’s currently indexing or deduplicting data it can cause performance issues especially with only 16GB of RAM if you have a bit of data in the vault already.

Good luck and hope you manage to find the cause of the speed issues shortly.

Hi Datastor,

thanks again very much for pushing into the right directions.
- With your backup plan are you using a disk/volume backup or File level backup?
> So far I was only able to create disk/volume backups with possible file/folder exclusion list, but no "file level backup"

- If you copy a folder with allot of small files to the backup server what speed do you get? (Eg, could there be anti-virus causing speed issues or a I/O speed issue perhaps)
> We do not run server side anti virus because of the well known I/O impacts

- Please check if you are using a Managed vault that it does not have deduplication enabled as if it’s currently indexing or deduplicting data it can cause performance issues especially with only 16GB of RAM if you have a bit of data in the vault already.
> Thanks for this hint. I've created a managed vault with dedup in the first try, but i guess i had done some mistake. Since it is just a trial, i've wiped the backup vault and recreated a managed vault without dedup. The backup speed for volume backup of the virtual 2003 machine ran in about half an hour. Right now i am trying again with a new vault and dedup feature activated. I've done a full as well as an incremental backup both completing in 40 minutes.

- If you are currently backing upto a vault please try to setup a network share (UNC path) and try to run a backup directly to this path to see if you might have a vault/storage node performance issue...
> Maybe there has been an issue with the storage node. See above.

This morning i had switched back from the ESXi trial mode to the free license and still quite good performance in backup, though VM-Backup is not available any longer due to the missing license of "vStorage-APIs". So I guess, there must have been a configuration issue with the vault/storage node. I will schedule a few backups for my remaining trial time and keep watching their progress.

Again thanks so far.

Hi EDV

No problems, glad you managed to find the issue and get your backup times better.

If you ever look at running Deduplication I strongly suggest reading the requirements and best practice guide lines from the manual, it covers some important points that are good to keep in mind: http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/ABR11/index.html#3349.html

All the best!

Glad to see this working for you EDV.