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

SAN Fiber Channel setup

NetBackup 52xx appliance can act as a powerful Fiber Transport media server ingesting data from SAN Client's using standard SAN Fiber Channel setup. From the performance perspective SAN Client provides one of the fastest methods to send data from NetBackup client to the appliance and presents a very resource-intensive workload on the appliance.

SAN Client can send data either to MSDP or AdvancedDisk on the appliance. Each of these destinations presents different workloads on appliance resources.

Table: Performance determinant with SAN Client setup

Implementation Type

Description

Guidelines

SAN Client with MSDP implementation

You cannot implement a NetBackup client-based deduplication when SAN Client is used.

Media server deduplication mode is very resource-intensive on the appliance, especially on the CPU, and all guidelines for the Media server-based deduplication performance sizing apply in this scenario.

In addition to the CPU workload caused by the deduplication process, the HBA itself presents additional load utilizing 5 Mhz of CPU clock cycles per every 1 MB/s of data throughput as a general rule of thumb.

This load is significant and should be calculated as additional load on the appliance. Combined with Media server-based deduplication requirements, this will lower throughput calculation significantly based on how much bandwidth is used for the SAN Client data.

SAN Client with AdvancedDisk implementation

AdvancedDisk workload primarily uses disk I/O resources of the appliance.

The amount of data sent to the AdvancedDisk on the appliance should not be more than the appliance disk I/O capability.

When sizing for the AdvancedDisk and SAN Client, maximum disk I/O throughput of 600 MB/s should be considered as a conservative number.

Careful planning has to be done during architecture and performance sizing operations to achieve maximum performance. The following measures can be taken in addition to improve performance using a SAN Fibre Channel setup:

  • Having additional HBA ports dedicated to FTMS will help with overcoming some limits on scaling (number of SAN Clients per port ) and redundancy (some customers require redundant connectivity), but for the performance sizing limitation is still ingestion capability of the appliance.

  • Best possible throughput of one SAN target port working in the 8 Gb SAN environment can reach 780 MB/s (1560 Mb/s for two FTMS ports in the target mode) when fully saturated. NetBackup 5230 and 5240 appliance have an advanced architecture and can handle more I/O bandwidth on the PCI bus.

  • OS used with the appliances is based on the Linux OS and all FTMS or SAN Client limitations on Linux apply, for example number of streams to buffer size ratio.

  • The number of FT streams on Linux and NetBackup Appliance is in direct relation with the buffer size and if the number of streams is increased the buffer size has to be reduced. Although it is possible to change the number of streams and reduce buffer size from the root prompt, deploying such a configuration in a production environment requires a support exception.