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