Arcserve unstable / major speed drops / re-install

[securityforums]

Just when I was half happy with arcserve(i havent even had to touch it for a few weeks) its all gone majorly wrong again. A job said it was active when it had finished.

Firstly tried stopping all engines / rebooting but could not kill it. Have had to remove everything on the local storage server, re-install and re-apply SP4.

Now I load in exactly the same backup scripts, same hardware, same bloody everything yet its all gone wrong again. When backing up using the client agent I am getting approximately 5meg/min, used to get in the region of 300meg/min.

So I re-applied SP4 of the client agent / exchange agent on remote servers yet nothing has changed, the speed has gone down to such a stupid speed the backup will take over 30 hours to complete which is a joke.

I really do not know what else to do now, I finally thought this excuse for backup software had sorted itself come SP4 but literally NOTHING has changed yet overnight it decides to kill itself.

Although this bothers me it is not the end of the world, but when after reinstalling these speeds again I have totally run out of ideas. There is DEFINATELY no speed issues between the servers, I have tested throughput several times and I will not have this as an excuse from computer associates that this is the cause of the problem.

I dont want to sound too harsh but arcserve has never been reliable for me and since people's jobs are on the line with regards to backup I have hardly any confidence left in this software at all.

I cannot even approach computer associates support now as I know they will just suggest the same things over and over again, firstly they will blame the speed between servers, then ask me to reduce the buffer on the client agents, and then ask me to reinstall / apply SP4, then ask for a log and ill never hear anything ever again.

I would REALLY appreciate if anyone who uses this software could suggest anything which could be causing these issues. We used to have major speed issues especially before sp2 and 3 but since the release of 4 I *thought* it was finally solved, but obviously not.

Using arcserve advanced edition SP4, SP4 of all agents including BAOF, client agent and exchange 2000 agents(info store level not bricks). Servers connected via 100mbit full duplex IBM netfinity cards both have dedicated port on 100mbit cisco catalyst switches. Proven throughput across ports is approx 5meg/sec, previous backups were always in the region of 300meg/min +.

Any help appreciated with this

Regards

 

[jptaylor]

We had a similar problem with the backup speed, however, our throughput was slow from the start. I read somewhere in this forum that the network adapters should be set to half duplex for increased throughput. After setting all the network adapters to half duplex our total backup time went from about 12 hours to just over 1. It's worth a try.

 

[mcse924]

JP,

That is amazing! I am also experiencing a speed degradation issue like DBRASCO. We bought a new server, 1/2 GB RAM, 1.8 MHZ Xeon, etc, etc. I also was using a 64-bit Adaptec SCSI card to connect our library. On the old server, we were forced to pop the SCSI card into a 32-bit slot, and we had no hardware issues doing this, our backups ran pretty well.

On the new server, I have the 64-bit card in a 64-it slot. I thought to myself, WOW, now we're really gonna' cook! Much to my surprise, after migrating the Arcserve jobs, database, etc. the backup jobs crawl!!! Jobs that previously took 5 hrs now take over 12 hrs!!! Unacceptable!

I will try the fix with the NICS, but on the old server we had these set to 100mb/s Full and had pretty good backup speeds. The only reason (I'm assuming) this might work now is that these are NEW nics I am working with on the new server. By the way I did not mention, we don't backup over the production network, we have 2 nics on all servers, the 2nd NIC is for backups over a backup segment, so as to not use production pipes for data backup traffic.

wish me luck...

 

[securityforums]

Computer associates do suggest turning down the duplex settings but this is unacceptable.

Its always the way with CA, blame it on everything else about the OS, or speed / duplex / switch settings when 90% of the time it is their own software.

I find myself having to check logs for arcserve pretty much every day, and every month or so it needs a re-install because it cocks up so badly even with SP4.

The only positive is that I did have to restore from a backup for exchange 2000 recently which worked using the agent, which I should hope so really due to the cost of it.

Reducing your duplex settings on a storage server will obviously have a speed affect for users, unless maybe you could schedule a script to switch duplexes before and after the backup

 

[JakeCutter]

Hi,

I had a problem with jobs that wouldn't die, even after a reboot.

Databasebaba recommended a patch from CA that worked for me - check out thread478-428940 for the link.

That might sort part of it out for you...

Cheers,

Jake Jake Cutter
IT Operations: Always outnumbered, always outgunned...

 

[maleyj]

We had the same problem with the BAOF and Arcserve told us there is a fix on there website, the fix is a group of replacement files. We just put this up on our dedicated server and it seemed to help.