Veeam v6 Distributed Architecture – Proxies, Repositories and Bears! OH MY!

With the release of Veeam Backup and Replication v6 came a completely redesigned distributed architecture.  This architecture, coupled with many other enhancements to v6 (listed here) work together to help you achieve faster transfer speeds, more concurrent jobs, and removes the load off of your Veeam Backup server.

I decided to run a few tests just to see if in fact they are faster!  Now I only replicated local, as well, I only ran one concurrent job, and I only included one VM so make note that I'm not using this technology to its' full potential, but none the less, I did still see an improvement.

So I fired up an 80 GB VM and first ran replication the way I would normally have in v5.  That is replicated directly to an ESXi host.  

So as you can see it took roughly 59 minutes to complete the first full replication of the VM.  Also it specifies the bottleneck as being my target, in this case, the host that I'm replicating to.  So, I created a Windows 2008 VM on the target ESXi host and added that VM to Veeam as a Backup Proxy.  I created a new replication job targeting the same VM, duplicated all of the settings from the first job but this time specifying my newly created VM as the Target Proxy.  Re-ran the job with the following results…

and voila.  This time my full replication only took roughly 45 minutes!  I know you may be thinking that's only 14 minutes faster, but it's also just 1 VM.  Take that 14 minutes and multiply it by 50 VMs or 100 VMs and you end up with a nice little time saver!  As well, you can see now that my target is no longer by bottleneck.  This inspired me to go one step further.  I created another VM and set this one up as a Backup Proxy as well.  Again, duplicated the job, this time setting my new proxy as the Source Proxy and leaving the Target Proxy as the one I created in the last step.  Once again I did a full replication of the VM…

OK!  Now we're talkin!  Coming in now at just under 26 minutes we have shaved off 33 minutes and cut our replication time more than half!   This to me is a huge advantage, especially if you are doing any sort of replication across a WAN.  Again, these are just my tests so you may not get the same results.  But for the most part this is what I have been seeing with my replication jobs in v6 so far.  So if you aren't using any of the new distributed architecture components included in Veeam v6 I would probably read up on them and get them into your environment.  Veeam has done a great job with this release and this is just one of many new features and enhancements that they have included.  On another side note, subsequent incremental replication jobs on this VM are taking a whopping 4 minutes and processing at a rate of 300 MB/s or so.  WOW!

Again as always, any comments or question or corrections don't hesitate to post in the areas below…