Build 11639: ESXi AcronisESXAppliance Backups Slower than Build 11345
Hi Acronis
I just upgraded my environment the other day and i have a couple of questions regarding the change in the new build for the AcronisESXAppliance.
1. Why have they moved away from mounting ESXi VM drives to the appliance to be backed up at local drive speeds (Build 11345 had this)?
I was able to achieve backups and restores that ran between 50-150MB/s when they were mounting the drives to the appliance, i was amazed at the ability to restore a 600GB Oracle ASM drive in under 3hours and also the speed was unaffected by VMs with snapshots!!! Now they have gone back to not mounting the drives, and possibly using the host technologies (VCB, vStorage Network etc.) to backup, and i am not able to reach 20MB/s. On some of my hosts i have to backup near 4TB of VMs and this has increased the time it takes to backup from an overnight 12-15hours to now being a few days, not feasible.
2. Is there a setting i may have missed that may bring back the original functionality of having the VM drives mounted to the AcronisESXAppliance to get back that backup speed?
I have been trying several different versions of your Enterprise product since beta10 back in May-2009, but you guys just keep changing stuff! Bring back this feature ASAP otherwise i am off the boat forever, too much time burnt just trying to setup a simple backup system!
Regards
Nathan
Hi Gilles
Its running on a vSphere 4 Update 1, but is not patched to the firmware released in the last month.
Having said that, this feature was working on the AcronisESXAppliance Build 11345.
I have tested Veeam Backup and it works amazingly, very fast incremental backups in both appliance and network mode using vStorage API, but full backups with the drives mounted locally to the agent were quicker with the Acronis appliance.
Also, when it comes to restores Veeam are limited to 20-50MB/s, whereas Acronis would mount the drive locally to the AcronisESXAppliance and do resotore at full speed. I was getting 70MB/s restoring a 600GB Oracle ASM drive.
I am trying for a solution that still has the ability to deploy agents so i can do file-level restores, from a backup taken at a host level, directly on the machine.
Regards
Nathan
Hi! I've investigated similar issue already, so here are my 2c.
1. AcronisESXAppliance first tries to mount snapshot of the VM disk. Operation may fail hovewer, i.e. if AcronisESXAppliance is installed on the 2nd ESX and VM is on the 1st ESX. Besides, local mount won't work without "Hot add" licensed feature of ESX - vSphere U0 has it in >="Advanced" license, U1 - in any license.
2. If local mount fails AcronisESXAppliance tries to connect snapshot of the VM disk remotely, so speed of backup\restore degrades as AcronisESXAppliance first uses network to read data from snapshot, then to write backup to the storage.
I don't think there are many reasons why local mount can fail. You can try to test it manually - try to mount SCSI virtual disk from powered-off VM to the AcronisESXAppliance's SCSI interface while it's running (online). Powered-off VM must be on the same ESX as AcronisESXAppliance. If you'll succeed - the problem is on the AcronisESXAppliance's side, otherwise somewhere outside. Don't forget to unmount the disk after experiment :)
Hi Steve
Thanks for the information.
I deploy one AcronisESXAppliance to each host and apply a backup policy that is local to that appliance and the VM's on its host.
We have Standard licensing for each of the hosts, which allows for hot add.
With Build 11345 when the AcronisESXAppliance mounts the disk, after taking a backup of the VM, i would see in the log of vSphere client that the AcronisESXAppliance has been 'reconfigured successfully' with the new drives, however, i do not see this anymore in the new build.
Having said that, i have been able to manually add Windows, Linux and Oracle ASM drives to the appliance.
Can Acronis verify this change or whether they have chosen to remove this functioning and why?
Regards
Nathan
The "local mounting" functionality is not removed, at least it is working for me on the latest build. Seems your case is not common.
Hi Steven
Hmmm... Thats strange.
I deployed both through the management console and also through OVF manually.
Wondering what i am missing?
Did you set any custom settings inside the deployed plans?
Is it file level or disk level backups you are running? Mine are Disks -> All Volumes
Regards
Nathan
Well...
I have done two re-installs and deploys of the whole Acronis setup and am unable to get this going.
Wondering whether its because its on an ESXi box as opposed to ESX with the Service Console.
I am deploying the backup policy to the appliance dynamic group that is created automatically and am storing backups on a managed store sitting on a samba share. No deduplication or compression used.
Regards
Nathan
Hi.
I think that the way of AcronisESXAppliance deployment, details of the backup plan\policy, files, disks or volumes being selected for backup, ESX vs ESXi, all of this have no link with your problem - "local disk mounting" feature is down.
AFAIK virtual IDE disks also may be the reason.
Try to contact support by email, i see the problem is deep inside.
Hello all,
Thank you very much for all your comments.
I contacted our Development team to clarify this situation, and as soon as we have a definite answer, we shall update this thread with it.
Thank you.
Hello all,
First of all, I would like to thank everyone for their contribution to this topic.
I got a response from our Development team, and there have been no drastic changes to our virtual edition.
However, Nathan, what you are experiencing could be caused by several things.
For example:
- If you are using an IDE disk instead of SCSI, this is not very likely, since your configuration worked with the previous version of our software.
- There is no hot plug license.
- Your Virtual Appliance was installed on one ESX host and tries to back up virtual machines from another host. This will also be true if you are using vCenter integration.
- There is no place to plug an additional disk.
- In case of Cluster environment, if you are trying to backup a VM that resides on a local storage of ESX, but the VA resides on another. Next week we shall be releasing a Knowledge Base article that will explain more about working with our Virtual edition and cluster environment.
If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Thank you.
Hi Anton
Thanks for the update.
- If you are using an IDE disk instead of SCSI, this is not very likely, since your configuration worked with the previous version of our software.
The server itself is a DELL R900 with MD1000 disk arrays direct-attach, containing SAS drive.
The virtual drives generally use LSI Logic Parallel SCSI Controller to most VMs and BusLogic SCSI Controller for XP and older OS's
- There is no hot plug license.
We have vSphere standard licensing, which allows for hot plug
- Your Virtual Appliance was installed on one ESX host and tries to back up virtual machines from another host. This will also be true if you are using vCenter integration.
I deploy a Virtual Appliance to each host and apply a local backup policy for each host
- In case of Cluster environment, if you are trying to backup a VM that resides on a local storage of ESX, but the VA resides on another. Next week we shall be releasing a Knowledge Base article that will explain more about working with our Virtual edition and cluster environment.
Not clustered
I think you might have missed the point that this was working on Build 11345.
Anyways, i will wait for this backup run to finish, its been going for two days so far, and i will deploy Build 11345 and see if it works.
I was hoping to have a solution down pat by this coming Monday but i will have to continue testing a few different solutions.
Regards
Nathan
I'd suggest to open backup log and see if there is something unusual _before_ the string "Creating snapshot ...".
Hi Steve
I have just resorted to deploying the old version and the feature is now working again.
I noticed that upon deployment the old version has gone through the inventory finding all the UUID's for the VMs whereas the new build didn't do this.
The reason i went for the upgrade was because after restoring the Oracle ASM drive at amazing speeds this old version wouldn't function and i couldn't run tasks anymore. So looks like i will have to test that again.
Hopefully they release a new build that has this all sorted for me.
Regards
Nathan
Hello all,
Thank you for the updates.
Nathan Birch,
It appears that the Virtual Appliance for build 11639, is not mounting the hard drive properly.
To determine the exact cause of the issue, do you think you could collect logs both from build 11345 and build 11639 respectively? This will help us to get to the bottom of this.
To collect the logs, please connect to the ESX Appliance from Acronis Backup and Recovery Management console. Reproduce the issue by running a backup. In the Management Console connected to the Appliance please go to Logs. Save them and please send me a PM with the files.
Also, can you run the AcronisInfo report on the machine with the Acronis Management Console and send it to me via a PM as well.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
Hi Anton
Thanks for the reply.
I have sent off the PM.
Regards
Nathan
Hello Nathan,
Thank you for getting back to me.
I appreciate the logs you have provided us, I will forward this to our Expert team, so that we can determine what causes this. In any case, I will keep you updated, as well as provide you with a workaround, regarding this issue either here, in this thread or via a PM.
If you need additional assistance or have any other questions, please let me know.
Thank you.
Hi Nathan, any chance where you can share the steps here onto fixing this issue? 