How many EBR VBAs per vCenter

Would you have any update on this topic?

Hi,

I don't know if there is a limit here.

What we are using is 2 Appliances with 2 Proxy (6 machines) each on one vcenter for around 250 VM.

If you really need performance, you will install one appliance or proxy per ESX. But it could be too many machine.

It's depends also of you data store configuration, as the appliance should be able to access the data store of your VM.

For remote host, it should not be a problem, as an appliance will be able to backing up a VM in the same vcenter.

Be aware than the supported configuration  for VBA 8.2 is vcenter 5.5 and not 5.1

So far as i know.

Hope it's help you

Cheers

Greg

Thanks for your feedback.

Our environment is similar to this: we have one vCenter let’s say with 2 cluster, one for DEV and one for PROD. LUN masking is different for PROD and DEV, ie ESXs from PROD will have their datastores and ESXs from DEV will have their own different datastores.

Plan A is: install 2 VBA/EBR appliance (one for PROD, one for DEV) + 2 or 3 proxy per appliance (in order to have 5 proxy max per vCenter ar recommended by EMC)

Plan B is: install a dedicated ESX that will have access to all the datastores (DEV & PROD) and install the VBA/EBR appliance on this ESX along with the 5 proxy.

We asked the question to EMC support, let’s see what they say …

Hello,

We actually have have remote sites with VMware hosts but they are all centrally managed by a single vCenter Server. I am curious to see if it would be beneficial to have multiple VBAs installed to backup each site locally. please let me know if we ca install a VBA on each remote VMware Cluster and still maintain just one vCenter Server?

We went for plan A: 2 EBR appliances with 2 or 3 external proxy attached.

Performance are much better this way since it does hotadd.

Both vCenter and Networker seem to be OK with this config.

Unfortunately there 's a "but" ...

We've got one policy with about 180 VMs attached. This policy does a bakcup + clone. It's linked with 1 EBR + 3 external proxy.

It works well for about 2/3 of the VMs but for the remaining third we have the following error

2015-02-10T10:34:32.260-02:00 avnwcomm Error <0000>: Error connecting to NetWorker server.

2015-02-10T10:34:32.260-02:00 avnwcomm Error <0000>: Connection to NetWorker server timed out.

2015-02-10T10:34:32.260-02:00 avnwcomm Error <0000>: No valid connection to NetWorker server.

2015-02-10T10:34:32.262-02:00 avnwcomm Info <0000>: Final summary exitcode 0

I raised a ticket to EMC support ...

We are currently implementing this and our understanding is the vCenter will handle a total of 48 sessions; secondly, each VBA and proxy will contribute 8 sessions each regardless of whether these are all being used (unless none are) so to have more than 5 proxies requires you to stagger their usage so only 5 at a time maximum are being used.  If you employ a second VBA the combined throughput for both VBAs would still be 48 sessions; it is not clear whether their would circumstances where it would be beneficial to deploy two VBAs.

Hi ETPG,

Are you sure you can attach more than 2 Proxy to a VBA? We always get the information that it was possible to attach at max 2 Proxy per VBA...

We also try to not have more than 50 Vm per Policy, to limit the load on the vcenter.

Hope its help.

Greg

Update:

  We been encountering issues and no consistency on our back ups. We have one vCenter and we have remote sites all over the US. We installed the one ebr at a site and proxies at our remotes sites and since they are considered external proxies(one ebr), when we would deploy a backup it would talk to other sites causing slow connections causing failures in our backups or sometimes our back would take hours or days to complete. With that in mind, since the EBR has a internal proxy, we went ahead and installed EBR rather than the proxy at one of our remote sites for testing. The results was that we were able to finish a backup in 10 min. Since the EBR was talking locally the backup was quicker. i was able to back up 3 VMs average 60 GB. Tonight we added more VMs and will give a status on the outcome.

Thanks

@Gregoire

Actually I couldn't find this information in NetWorker-8.2-VMware-Integration-Guide. They only recommend 5 external proxy max / vCenter.

Since we always have these Networker time out, we'll try this "50 VM per policy" approach ...

PS:

Actually it seems Networker will use only 2 external proxy + VBA appliance when backuping ... so you might be right about the 2 proxy per appliance

Any idea how to decom/unregister a VBA proxy?

Hi ETPG,

I don't think you have something special to do with decom/unregister a VBA proxy. Just shutdown it. There are no info about backup on the proxies. They are all stored in the Appliance itself.

But you better check that with the support...

Cheers

Greg

I have more information now    The vCenter has a limitation of being able to handle 50 snapshots.  The vCenter will support one VBA and optimally 5 proxies as this will give a total number of streams under the 50 maximum.  You can install as many proxies as you wish, the recommendation is that you never have more than 5 proxies active at one time but there is no evidence to suggest that if you are not using all 8 proxy streams it will lock the unused ones.

Secondly, as I mentioned about we have a central vCenter with multiple remote ESX servers and small Data Domains on those sites for backups.  As such it is important to avoid backup traffic across the WAN by creating the snapshot on a proxy external to that site.  I have established the following rules:

* if a proxy is on the same datastore (not datacenter which the documentation says!) as the VM being backed up it will create the snapshot and backup from there.

* if there is no proxy on he datastore where the VM being backed up is, a proxy will be randomly assigned from the available proxies.

Another important point; if you make an error with the naming during the configuration of the proxy it will fail to make the match and your backup will go who-knows-where....

Thanks for your update.

Not sure to understand how you can setup such rules though?

On our side we’ll have 1 VBA appliance + 2 proxy maximum working at the same time, ie 24 connections/snapshots (8x3) at the same time, which should be OK !?

As previously mentioned, I’ve created 4 policies, using 4 different media pools with 4 different devices on our DD (data domain). These 4 policies will have about 40VMs each and will be schedule at different time (in order to reduce the load on our vCenter). Each policy will do a backup + clone.

One other thing I’m wondering about is the relation between the number of connections our DD can handle (180 for a DD2500) and the setting we use in Networker for parallelism (100 for instance).

Any recommendation here?

The rules are within the Networker software, not rules that you can configure in any way.

If you have a VBA+2 proxies your system will be limited to 24 snapshots at one time so this is not going to impinge on the limits of the DD or Networker parallelism setting of 100 unless you have significant non-VM traffic too.