How to optimize drives usage?

[picapiedra]

Hi all, and thanks in advance.

Scenario:

NBU 4.5 FP5

1 Master/Media Server, Solaris.
1 Media Server, Solaris.
25 Solaris clients.
25 Windows 2003 clients.
SAN environment for some Solaris/Windows clients.
Devices: both are SUN L60, so I have twelve DLT8000 drives.

I´m trying to backup one W2003 server with 150 Gb, and I can use up to six drives for this policy.

How should I set the policy to use more than one drive, reducing time? I know I´m going to need more than two tapes, and I don´t want this backup to take 8 hours to finish, so, why not use three drives at the same time?
I know about the *.utl file in the Solaris environment, but, what about the W2003 clients?

Any help?
Thanks again.

 

[PGPhantom]

Once I get my copy of Enterprise 5.0 I will be updating that FAQ or creating a new one as there are some buffer changes, at least from what I have read.

 

[enterprisebu]

Thanks. I've been trying to figure out what changes I should make but since upgrading to 5.0 and starting exchange backups I've had so many problems I'm drowning

 

[PGPhantom]

What problems? The upgrade should not of created any new problems - The buffers all work in either version.

 

[enterprisebu]

Well, problems with the exchange backups that may not really be problems. They just take forever and it's causing trouble. Mostly buggy stuff like not being able to cancel running jobs. We have it in engineering now and they are duplicating each incidence.

It was hard to tell for awhile whether our problems were exchange, bad buffering making jobs run too long and creating a cascade of problems, hardware with tape drives, etc. We are just now weeding through them.

I wasn't involved in the exchange addition so I'm not sure if it's performing as expected or not. I do know that all of our exchange backups (mailbox, database and public folder) are well below 800kpbs.

 

[PGPhantom]

Ouch - On some of mine I am in excess of 20,000 Kb/sec. If your backup account does not have FULL access to the excahnge database, you may be getting a lot of time out problems relating to security. The Exchange should be straight forward - I can see mailbox backups taking a "bit" longer but datastores etc should be no problem.

 

[enterprisebu]

What are your buffer setting for the exchange clients? Same as for a regular file server? I have it set at 129 but checking through the logs I see that our highest 1024 byte segment written was still only about 1300kbps.

I'll check the logs during the exchange times and see if I find any waits for buffering either way.

While my AIX media servers went from 13 hours to under 5 with the buffers reset the intels only saw mild improvements. Very few of them perform better than 1000kbps. The ones that do are still under 5000kbps but two or three usually run above 20000kbps.

I've heard that out of date nic drivers can impact performance. Have you tried/seen this?

 

[PGPhantom]

NIC's ==== DEFINTIELY a source of many, many problems. If you use auto-negotiate on your switch, NIC's etc, you will have problems, unless they are GB NIC's in which case Full/Duplex is always assumed. You need to manually change the NICS's for 100/full. If you are using Broadcom NIC's - Get rid of the old drivers as they are very, very buggy and can cause a lot of phantom outages during backups. They have a new driver v7.x that works like a charm.

I use the same buffer settings for all servers.

 

[enterprisebu]

I'd resolve several issues with backups failing because they had AN on the clients. I've asked them to check the 20 slowest machines but I've been waiting for weeks for the results. Only our master is GB. I believe they are using compaq's nics, but I work in the AIX department and don't have privileges on their servers so I have to depend upon their help for information. I'm beginning to think they don't care what I'm going through over here I can't even get them to listen to me when I ask them to update the nic drivers.

 

[enterprisebu]

PGPhantom - what's the fragment size on your storage unit for Exchange backups?

 

[PGPhantom]

I have left hem at the default which I believe to be 2Gb

 

[enterprisebu]

Mazrmit,

http://www.zedat.fu-berlin.de/services/fab/man/4.5/TuningNetbackupOnNT-4.5.pdf

This is a tuning paper for 4.5 that explains the buffers and wait counters.