Veeam: 2 or 4 vCPU's, that is the question...

Deathmage

Hey guys,

So the past 3 months now I've been toying with our Veeam Backup and Replication v8 suite for our VMware cluster and I'm curious if anyone here has seen a true benefit of keeping a VM that is a utility server, basically all the IT management stuff we just need to stick someplace, with 4 or less vCPU's. I initially had it at 2 vCPU's but I bumped it to 4 to see if it made Veeam backups run faster on 'high' compression since it uses 10% more CPU and so far it seems to be working fine.

See to me it's a balancing act, you need to balance CPU cycles and also make sure your not wasting CPU's.

I'm really just curious if others on here that uses VMware with Veeam backups and have some performance tweaking suggestions to make Veeam work more efficient.

joelsfood

I think we run either 4 or 8, it definitely benefits from more cpus (and with 16 hosts, we can spare a few cores).

In theory, you could run datacenter and use powercli to increase the vCPU count dynamically during times you had backups running. We'd discussed the idea in passing, but never tested it, so can't vouch for it working

Deathmage

joelsfood wrote: »

I think we run either 4 or 8, it definitely benefits from more cpus (and with 16 hosts, we can spare a few cores).

In theory, you could run datacenter and use powercli to increase the vCPU count dynamically during times you had backups running. We'd discussed the idea in passing, but never tested it, so can't vouch for it working

I'm slowly but surely learning powershell , might even buy a distilled book on powershell if I can find one. I'm finding it very useful and seeing how in 2016 that I'm piloting at home, using T3, powershell is used allot.

I might leave her at 4 vCPU's tonight or possible 6 vCPU's if it's validated to have a benefit.

I really love the compression and deduplication of Veeam, really squishes a large database server down to nothing....aiming for 10 months of retention on a 24 TB Tier 3 Storage array.

Deathmage

@Joel

I'm wondering if I should start using Proxies for Veeam over the default, and make like two proxies with 2 vCPU's and 6 GB's of RAM on a VMXNET 3 NIC instead of just having the Veeam B&R Management having the default proxy server, my thought if I'm understanding how Veeam works from articles online, if you have a few proxy servers it will balance the load of the backup jobs across all of the proxies servers involved essentially pooling their resources to target destination. Obviously they should probably be on the same host as the Management Console so it can utilize the internal 10G vSwitch.

Thoughts?