Sean Wallbridge
After installing Veeam Enterprise Plus and enabling the WAN Acceleration feature the size of the backups did start to drop but not enough to overcome the limitations of the single Shaw “pipes” at either end of the installation. My customer was seeing Internet performance “crawl” at each location while backups were running and, because we couldn’t get backups to “thin out” enough to run to completion within the defined backup windows, we decided to shutdown the remote backups for now. And this was also the case at the second installation where we had hoped to do replication to a remote DR site; the single Shaw pipes at each end were just not sufficient to handle the traffic generated by Veeam as well as all of the other production traffic.
I want to state emphatically that this is not a failure of Veeam; not in any way or any shape. Rather, it is a stark reminder that “inexpensive” low-bandwidth pipes can’t hope to meet the growing data transmission needs of many organizations. Bandwidth “rules” and it will make or break a project like the ones I’ve been attempting.
We are going to look into the possibility of installing additional Shaw pipes to handle only the Veeam traffic as the process itself works and there is massive value in having backup data automatically “live” in multiple locations. And we are going to pray to the network gods that Shaw will actually rollout the long-promised upgrade in bandwidth and upload speeds that we have all been waiting for for oh so long.
Did you try seeding the backup copy first. This would allow you to move the majority of the files with USB/Snail method, and then the backup copy job would just have to move the incremental changes.
Just a though I wanted to throw out there.
Thanks
Thanks for your comment. I did mention in the earlier updates on this topic that, yes, the backups and the replicas were all seeded. That part worked very well; the problem at least at one client is that there is a large amount of data that changes daily (adds, updates) and it is simply too much to pass out in a timely fashion over a small pipe. 5Mbps upload speeds are not terribly big, specially when you consider that the bandwidth is required for ALL the site’s Internet access and not just the Veeam backups. So, I will re-iterate my point: Veeam works exceedingly well but even its internal “black magic” can’t overcome the inherent limitations of “thin” Internet connections. I pray for the upcoming Shaw bandwidth improvements to happen sooner than later. Doubling the upload speed/bandwidth will go a long way towards making all of this much more viable for me and our clients. For now, for Veeam remote backups to work for us without severely impacting all concerned will require additional “dedicated” pipes for the backup traffic.
Robert