Sean Wallbridge
I’ve managed to get a lot farther with the backup process. All of the issues with the second VM have been fixed and the remote backup of that VM has been successful. Throughput for it is the same as that for the first VM so I’m pretty happy overall.
A few things learned along the way (above and beyond what was Iisted in the last update):
- The load placed on the WAN connections can be pretty noticeable. In this case, the remote site is at an owner’s house and he definitely knows when the backup is running as his Internet connection (from machines in the house) becomes pretty “pokey”. I’m assuming the same is similar at the source end of the backup, as well. It might pay to have multiple ISP feeds to support remote backup if you are planning to move any amount of data. At the same time, it might also pay to have a separate backup network established at the source site in order to keep performance disruptions to a minimum on the production LAN.
- Veeam can gracefully recover from a failed backup run, even on first run of a “seeded” backup. My backup today was disrupted at the target end, probably when house users “messed” with things on the house LAN during backup. The “retry” feature of the backup worked well, thankfully.
- 5 Mbps as an upload speed doesn’t cut it anymore (are you listening Shaw, Bell, Telus and all the other Canadian ISP’s?). We need better upload speeds, specially for this kind of application. The upload speed will be the limiting factor in any remote backup/replication scenario. While Veeam has all sorts of tricks to help “slim” the datastream, the bottom line is there is only so much data that can be crammed through a tiny pipe over a given time period. I am truly envious of the speeds my American cousins usually enjoy on their connections. So, the extra cost of Veeam Enterprise Plus will probably be worth it for any of us that have slowish connections and/or large amounts of backup/replication traffic.
That’s it for now. I’m going to twiddle and tune the backup and will post another update once I have the schedule and such figured out.