Resource Config Options for ESXi Virtual Appliance?
Are there any general recommendations for resource changes to the Virtual Appliance to enhance performance?
Mine was created as 6-vCPU, 4GB DRAM, & one each 5GB/1GB disks.
I have a Windows server backup comprising of 5TB and running 18 hours for a full backup, with a warning after an hour "ACTIVITY NOT RESPONDING"... We are a small Engineering Lab group so I only have access to 1Gb ethernet to a Synology NAS array accessed via smb, but seeing pretty good saturation of ~650Mb/s.
The Virtual Appliance maxed out the 4GB of memory for hours at a time, so I increased to 16GB, which also is fully utilized for hours. Can/should this be increased further? CPU usage max's at 60%, but averages ~30% utilization.
Any other recommendations that should/should not be pursued?
Thanks-

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In reply to Hi Brad,… by truwrikodrorow…

Thanks Vasily,
I only have the single Windows VM on this ESXi server and no other Windows licenses to utilize at this time. I do have a CentOS 6.8 VM and a standalone Win7 PC that could be utilized. Suggestion on best method to proceed?
This is a single VM backup Plan with 2 internal .vmdk disks (512GB Thick provisioned lazy zeroed & 256GB thin provisioned) in a single datastore, and an NFS NAS datastore mounted to the ESXi server (Synology NAS array Thin provisioned 8TB partition).
This VM is a Win 2012R2 & SQL Server with all partitions formatted by the Guest OS as NTFS. The structure might not be great, but it got our Lab data up and running after change in business focus for I.T. to no longer provide Lab support.
I suspect the issue might be with the ESXi NFS mounted data, but I am a newbie at VMs and their Backup, Best Practices...my Sys Admin experience is on *nix physical machines back to days of SunOS 4.1.3.
Regards,
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Hi Brad,
Thank you for the details. It makes sense to install Agent for VMware (Windows) onto your spare physical Windows 7 machine for troubleshooting. The issue could be related to "Hotadd" backup method used by default on appliance where backed up virtual disks are attached to the appliance VM and are read directly. With agent running on separate Windows 7 machine there will be Network Block Device (NBD) mode used which will open the virtual disks for read access over network and therefore there should be different behavior.
In either case please contact our support team for further troubleshooting.
Thank you.
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Doing a follow-up before I contact support in case these numbers may be of use to someone else...
Removed the VMware Virtual Appliance Agent. Installed VMware for Windows Agent on my Management Server (Win7-SP1 w/ 32GB DRAM, 1Gb ethernet). The differences were surprising...
A full backup of 3 disks (1 NFS mounted in to the ESXi server), comprising ~5TB of data, completed in 24 hours with the Virtual Appliance, but completed in 7.75 hours running off the Management Server. Both systems are even on the same port banks of a network switch. Both cases were using "Normal" Priority and Compression settings -- with a "High" Priority setting on the Virtual Appliance a test case completed in 16.5 hours (even with increasing the VM config to 16GB memory).
I'm very happy and can work with VMware for Windows Agent as a solution, but will work on figuring out how to open a support ticket so Acronis can review the technical details for possible improvements.
Regards,
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After many experiments and switching back to Virtual Appliance for vSphere 6.5, backups of 5TB of data consumed 51+ hours on a Gb ethernet. Support Team had me switch to older Backup Format V11, which resulted in same 5TB of data backing up in 13+ hours (acceptable). Apparently some NAS are sensitive to the additional "ACK"s sent for V12 Backups...
I'm also running 32GB of memory config on the virtual appliance (up from 4GB on the version 9010 template files) as was consuming 14GB of 16GB. On a full backup I still get "Activity Not Responding" E-Mails at little over 1 hour, even though I can see 100MB/s of data transfer for another 45 minutes--then after 1:45, the data rate slows down to 20MB/s for the remainder of the Full Backup. Modified to GFS plan instead of Weekly Fulls/Daily Incrementals, until 12.5 Update 3 is available.
Hopefully this may help someone with similar NAS sensitivity...
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