Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): Appliances (3.0)
Platform: NetBackup Appliance OS
  1. About this Guide
    1.  
      About this guide
    2.  
      About the intended audience
    3.  
      About the NetBackup appliance documentation
  2. Section I. Capacity planning
    1. Analyzing your backup requirements
      1. Analyzing your backup requirements
        1.  
          What do you want to backup?
        2.  
          How much data do you want to back up?
        3.  
          When should the backup take place?
        4.  
          What is the retention period?
        5. Record your backup requirements
          1.  
            Template to record computer system information
          2.  
            Template to record database information
          3.  
            Template to record application server information
    2. Designing your backup system
      1.  
        Addressing use cases of backup systems for enterprises
      2.  
        Addressing use cases of backup systems for remote or branch offices
      3. About NetBackup appliances
        1.  
          About the Master Server role
        2.  
          About the Media Server role
      4. Selecting new appliances
        1.  
          Selecting a media server
        2.  
          Selecting a master server
  3. Section II. Best Practices
    1. About the best practices section
      1.  
        About best practices
      2.  
        References to maintenance sites
    2. About implementing deduplication solutions
      1.  
        About implementing deduplication solutions
      2.  
        General recommendations
      3.  
        Oracle
      4.  
        Microsoft SQL
      5.  
        DB2
      6.  
        Sybase
      7.  
        Lotus Notes
    3. Network consideration
      1.  
        About network considerations
      2.  
        About Fibre Channel connectivity
      3. About SAN zone configurations
        1.  
          About zoning the SAN for NetBackup appliances
      4.  
        Validating network bandwidth
    4. Storage configuration
      1.  
        About storage configuration
      2. About configuring a shared storage pool
        1.  
          Calculating the basic stream count for backups
      3. About moving a storage partition for better performance
        1. Moving a partition
          1.  
            Move <partition> dialog
        2.  
          Moving a partition using the NetBackup Appliance Shell Menu
        3.  
          Moving the MSDP partition from a base disk to an expansion disk for optimum performance
    5. Generic best practices
      1.  
        Generic best practices
      2.  
        About Notification settings
      3.  
        About IPMI configuration
      4.  
        Disaster recovery best practices
      5.  
        Job performance
      6.  
        Architecture
      7.  
        NetBackup Catalog Backup
      8.  
        Patching with the SLP (storage lifecycle policies)
      9.  
        VMware backups using appliances
      10.  
        Improving NetBackup Appliance restore performance
  4. Section III. Performance tuning
    1. Role-based Performance Monitoring
      1.  
        Role-based configuration as a factor affecting performance
      2.  
        What affects the performance of a Master Server?
      3.  
        What affects the performance of a media server (MSDP)?
    2. Optimize network settings and improve performance
      1.  
        Optimize network settings and improve performance
      2.  
        SAN Fiber Channel setup
      3.  
        Network bonding
      4.  
        VMware VADP
      5.  
        Jumbo frame implementation for increased MTU
    3. Storage configurations
      1.  
        Storage configurations
      2.  
        Deduplication disk I/O and RAID level settings
      3. RAID Controller operations
        1.  
          RAID Controller commands
      4.  
        Deduplication load balancing
      5.  
        Storage Lifecycle Policies
      6.  
        Auto Image Replication (AIR)
      7.  
        AdvancedDisk settings
      8.  
        Tape Out operations
    4. NetBackup Appliance tuning procedures and performance monitoring
      1. About diagnosing performance issues
        1.  
          About CPU monitoring and tuning
        2.  
          About memory monitoring and tuning
        3.  
          About network monitoring and tuning
        4.  
          About I/O monitoring and tuning
        5.  
          General guidelines to spot a resource bottleneck
      2. About performance tuning practices
        1.  
          About I/O performance tuning
        2.  
          About Oracle backup and restore performance tuning
        3.  
          Setting NET_BUFFER_SZ to 0 on the NetBackup client for better WAN Optimization performance
      3. About tuning procedures and performance monitoring
        1. NetBackup Client performance
          1.  
            Using nbperfchk to validate disk performance on NetBackup Appliances
        2.  
          Other Performance Monitoring commands
  5. Section IV. Quick reference to Capacity planning and Performance tuning
    1. Capacity Planning checklist
      1.  
        Checklist for Capacity planning
      2.  
        Capacity measuring worksheet
    2. Best practices checklist
      1.  
        Best practices checklist
    3. How to monitor the performance of your appliance
      1.  
        About monitoring the performance of your appliance
      2.  
        Performance Monitoring matrix

When should the backup take place?

To correctly size and configure your backup solution, you must decide on the type and frequency of your backups. When considering a backup schedule you need to consider the following checks:

Table: Schedule a backup

Checks to be performed

Additional comments

Will you perform daily-incremental backups?

The size calculation and deduplication ratio for taking full backups differ from the size calculation and deduplication ratio required for an incremental backup.

When will you perform a full backup?

  • Weekly

  • Bi-weekly

  • Monthly

When you determine this information helps in calculating the storage capacity requirements for over longer period of time. The size calculation and deduplication ratio for taking full backups differ from the size calculation and deduplication ratio required for an incremental backup.

How many jobs will be run per day?

Considering that it takes 2 seconds / 3 seconds per job, it means that approximately ~15000 jobs per backup window (1000 per hour) are run. If the job count exceeds the 2-second or 3-second rule, you may need to consider increasing the backup window or setup a new domain.

Also, the number of jobs is limited by the total number of streams that appliance can take and also on the total throughput of the deduplication storage on the appliance.

What is the window of time that is available to complete each backup?

The length of a window dictates several aspects of your backup strategy. For example, you may want a larger window of time to back up multiple, high-capacity servers.

Would you want to configure a deduplication solution to take backups?

In some scenarios you may want to only use AdvancedDisk for backup. An AdvancedDisk is the normal disk backup, performed without any deduplication.

Deciding on whether you want to configure a deduplication solution can help you opt for a mix of MSDP and AdvancedDisk.

Would you want to consider using the advanced NetBackup features such as NetBackup accelerator?

NetBackup Accelerator uses a platform and file system independent track log to intelligently detect changed files and send the changed segments from those files to media server. These changed segments are written to a supported storage pool in the NetBackup Appliance. Although the primary benefit from NetBackup Accelerator is for performing full backups, it also reduces a subset of costs in running incremental backups.

Would you be adopting NDMP to perform backups?

The NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) is used along with NetBackup Accelerator to perform backup and recovery. The NetBackup Appliance supports NDMP stream handlers for EMC Celerra and NetApp which results in very high deduplication rate. Using Accelerator we can protect shares as mounted file systems. However, this is not a comprehensive backup of filers.

Do you plan to run an Off-site backup or Local backup?

The backup schedule is greatly affected if the backup is run locally or is transferred to an off-site location. The time to transfer a local backup to the off-site location will need to be estimated and considered at the time of scheduling a backup.

Is the computer system local or remote?

Determining the total number of systems that are local or remote can help determine the backup cycles.

Do you want to allow the users to run the backups and restores for their computer systems?

This can help to reduce the time it takes to initiate certain operations. However, user-directed operations can also result in higher support costs and the loss of flexibility in storage allocation and usage for backups. User-directed operations can monopolize media and tape drives when you most need them. They can also generate more support calls and training issues while the users become familiar with the new backup system.

Do you plan to back up any system over a network?

Identify the type of networks you plan to use for scheduling backups. Based on the amount of data that you want to back up and the frequency of those backups, you can also consider installing a private network for taking backups. Identifying this information can help you account for the time required to perform the backups over a network and select the best time period when the backup should be taken

Note:

It is recommended that you use SAN Client and dedicated HBA on the NetBackup client for taking backups.

What is your policy for backup expiration?

Identify the backup expiration time period for each of your policies, thus determining the possible restore options. For example, one of the commonly adopted policies is to expire your incremental backups after 2 weeks or 1 month and your full backups after 6 months. With this policy, you can restore any daily file change from the previous weeks or month and restore data from full backups for the previous 6 months