Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): Appliances (3.2, 3.1.2)
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.  
        About NetBackup 53xx High Availability solution
      5. 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 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 Fibre 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

Addressing use cases of backup systems for enterprises

The next step after you have analyzed your backup requirements is to start identifying the components that together will design your backup system. While designing a complete and efficient backup system you will also need to identify the core pain points that dictate the choices you make in selecting each component. For example, you are required to backup growing number of clients with large data sets, in this case your pain point would be to ensure that the backup solution you consider can account for expandable storage options

Some of the common pain points that you may come across have been listed below:

  • Choosing the right hardware, operating system, mandated IT application, and the backup software. Each of these come in multiple variables and increased interoperability challenges like dealing with too many vendors for maintenance.

  • Choosing tapes only for long-term retention.

  • Choosing the right Disk storage, as each type as its individual pain points:

    • DAS (Direct-attached storage) requires additional hardware and file system maintenance.

    • SAN (Storage area network) brings more complexity and operational costs.

    • NAS (Network-attached storage) taxes the network.

  • Choosing the right solutions to backup clients with large data sets. Large data sets means multiple challenges in dealing with:

    • Large databases and application servers

    • Large NAS Filers

    • Slow networks thus requiring to create a dedicated backup network

    • Unsuccessful scheduled full backups due to issues like exceeded backup window.

  • Choosing Virtual Machine protection to address concerns over:

    • Resource constrains

    • Dealing the VM Sprawl, when the number of virtual machines (VM) increases over time, simply because of the ease of creating VMs and not because those VMs are absolutely necessary for the business

    • Contrasting deduplication pools

In Table: Use cases with possible solutions we will be evaluating each of the above pain points as a separate use case and identifying the solutions that Veritas NetBackup Appliance offers to address these paint points:

Table: Use cases with possible solutions

Pain Point

Possible Solutions using Veritas NetBackup Appliance

Dealing with slow Networks

Multiple connectivity options can be considered:

  • Client deduplication processing

  • Standard Data Transfer over IP

  • Standard Data Transfer over FC

  • Optimized Transfer over IP

Dealing with clients containing large data sets

The power to scale-out in multiple dimensions using:

  • Client Deduplication

  • Media server Deduplication

  • Storage Expansion

Dealing with issues of backing up clients with large data sets - SAN Client

Protecting clients with large data set - SAN Client

  • High speed streaming through multiple Fibre Channel steams

  • No need for off-host systems (low TCO)

  • Use the processing power of Appliances for deduplication

  • Avoid configuring clients as backup servers - conserve resources for critical applications

  • Replace aging physical and virtual tape libraries

Accommodating backups of storage filers like NetApp and EMC

Protecting NetApp and EMC Filers

  • Adopting remote NDMP to free up resources for backing up NetApp and EMC filers

  • 10 GbE links for faster streaming, multiple links may be trunked for even larger pipes

  • Flexibility to stream to tape for long-term retention

  • Deduplication and replication offloaded from NetApp and EMC filers

Achieving high deduplication rates

Intelligent deduplication Stream Handlers for high deduplication rates

The NetBackupAccelerator is used to perform efficient scan of all files and send only changed segments to the appliance during each full backup. The operations necessary to generate full backup are performed on the appliance and master server in the background. Thus the full backup is deduplicated by using lesser MSDP storage space.

Accommodating traditional file servers

Protecting traditional file servers and NAS using optimized synthetics, accelerator and client-side deduplication

  • Highly recommended for any file server

  • Works for any NAS solution through a NAS Client (NFS/CIFS)

  • After the initial full backup, never run full backup again

  • Lowest effect on clients, network, and media server

  • Deduplication may be done at source or NetBackup Media server side

Adapting to VMware requirements

With NetBackup appliance direct vSphere Backup can be achieved due to the VMware backup host built into NetBackup 52xx Appliances.

  • For all VMs, 100% off-host backups can be taken with Single Appliance

  • Appliance software integrates VMware Access Host with NetBackup 52xx Appliances

  • All transport methods are supported (SAN, nbd, nbdssl, hotadd)

  • On the host that runs the NetBackup Administration Console or the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface, NetBackup must be at 7.5.0.1 or later.

  • The appliance must be version 2.5 or later. If the master server is on a separate host (not on the backup host), the master server must use NetBackup 7.5.0.1 or later.

  • The VMware policy type must be used. The FlashBackup-Windows policy type is not supported.

  • The appliance does not support iSCSI connections.

For more information, refer to the 'About the NetBackup appliance as a VMware backup host' section in the NetBackup™ Appliance Administrator's Guide.