Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): Appliances (3.3.0.1)
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
  6.  
    Index

About network monitoring and tuning

Table: Network Statistics (collected using ifstat 5) shows the network statistics collected with ifstat when the system was running 120 concurrent 98% deduplication backup streams.

Table: Network Statistics (collected using ifstat 5)

 

eth5

eth4

eth6

eth7

bond0

HH:MM:SS

in

out

in

out

in

out

in

out

in

out

17:26:21

564730.9

1302.0

1160000.0

2140.2

559536.6

1621.4

168878.4

1153.4

4710000.0

12498.8

17:26:26

460546.3

728.0

1150000.0

698.9

459263.6

1330.3

381489.9

1142.0

4770000.0

11797.7

17:26:31

227735.0

537.6

1150000.0

724.0

445882.1

951.5

444105.8

1069.2

4680000.0

9971.4

17:26:36

374109.8

962.3

889411.5

863.5

421187.4

450.1

423359.6

1091.7

4740000.0

8593.0

17:26:41

413063.0

826.2

827849.0

765.3

415254.8

454.0

414780.8

758.3

4710000.0

6980.5

17:26:46

416389.0

802.9

822851.8

309.1

413860.3

425.2

409673.9

393.7

4690000.0

5694.1

17:26:51

413397.2

644.5

866869.2

587.3

343333.5

439.7

407649.9

343.9

4650000.0

5744.9

17:26:56

428205.4

510.6

1150000.0

2804.2

224508.3

952.0

427518.5

592.0

4550000.0

9509.6

17:27:01

474236.7

1040.3

1090000.0

2321.1

473665.8

1309.5

472919.9

832.9

4680000.0

12125.6

Note:

Some of the columns from the output have been removed to simplify the display.

The above table showed the network throughput on the appliance of selected NIC ports. The appliance has 10 x 10 Gbps NICs bounded with the default balance-alb (adaptive load balance) mode. Under each NIC interface, the in column displays the kilobyte received per second from the network, while out column displays the kilobytes transmitted out per second. Eth4 is the primary slave which, in a couple 48 port switch models, tends to have a higher workload than the other slave NIC port. The data points highlighted in bold indicate that the NIC port is near capacity. With this condition, there is a possibility for packet loss. You can run the command "netstat - s |grep retransmit", periodically to check for the number of retransmits. Nonzero value initially is fine, but if you see that this value increases, then there may be a network congestion issue.

The standard tuning recommendations are:

  • Add or enable additional NIC ports

  • Change the bonding mode, especially when all other ports, except the primary slave, still have plenty of extra bandwidth. The default balance-alb mode can sometimes cause this problem on some switch models. Our internal test showed 802.3ad (LACP) bond mode can solve this problem.