Slow Veeam Backup Performance

[GamerDad]

First off, I'd like to say that I am brand new to Unraid, and currently trialing it. The first share that I would like to utilize is for our Veeam backup. I am getting rather slow performance to the share and I'm pretty certain I don't have a good configuration for the drives. The array has 2x 10tb parity drives, 6x 10tb storage drives, and a 2tb SSD cache drive. When I look at the overall status, the cache drive gets almost no read / writes, the two parity drives and only 1 storage device has any activity on it. I am assuming there is a way to configure the share to initially hit the cache drive, and then spread the data across multiple drives to increase the throughput. 

 

At this point, if a re-build is needed, I am ok with that. I would rather set it up properly for optimal performance. Veeam is connecting via SMB share to Unraid. Thank you in advance.

Array status:

 

Share settings:

[trurl]

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/shares/user-shares/#primary-and-secondary-storage-unraid-612

[JorgeB]

4 minutes ago, GamerDad said:

the cache drive gets almost no read / writes,

That will only happen if you set the share to use a pool as the primary storage, currently is set to array.

 

Note that you can also get better performance writing directly to the array with turbo write.

 

 

[trurl]

Mover is intended for idle time. Default schedule is daily in the middle of the night. It is impossible to move from fast cache to slow array as fast as you can write to cache. If you need to write more than cache can hold, don't cache.

 

 

[GamerDad]

4 minutes ago, trurl said:

Mover is intended for idle time. Default schedule is daily in the middle of the night. It is impossible to move from fast cache to slow array as fast as you can write to cache. If you need to write more than cache can hold, don't cache.

 

 

Understood and makes sense. 

 

What about only 1 array drive receiving all the writes. Is there a way to utilize multiple disks to increase the write? Right now only 1 of the array drives is receiving activity when writing the data.

[JorgeB]

9 minutes ago, GamerDad said:

What about only 1 array drive receiving all the writes

Unraid array doesn't stripe data, see the turbo write link above for better speeds, still it will never be as fast as a striped pool, for that you can use for example a raidz zfs pool, instead of the array.

[GamerDad]

1 minute ago, JorgeB said:

Unraid array doesn't stripe data, see the turbo write link above for better speeds, still it will never be as fast as a striped pool, for that you can use for example a raidz zfs pool, instead of the array.

Is that something that can be set up with Unraid, or should I look for an alternative? (assuming turbo write doesn't improve it enough)

 

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, GamerDad said:

Is that something that can be set up with Unraid

Yes, you can also use pools with Unraid.

[JorgeB]

Assuming no bottlenecks, this is what I would expect approximately for write speed, based on config and with those disks:

 

array non turbo write - 60/80MB/s

array turbo write - 180/220MB/s

zfs raidz2 pool - 400/600MB/s

 

zfs pool is better for performance but it's not as flexible, also if you lose more disks that the pool can recover from you will lose the whole pool, pool vs array always has some advantages, but also some disadvantages, you can't have everything.

 

 

[GamerDad]

3 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Assuming no bottlenecks, this is what I would expect approximately for write speed, based on config and with those disks:

 

array non turbo write - 60/80MB/s

array turbo write - 180/220MB/s

 

Your estimates are actually very close. It was about 80-90 non turbo. Turbo right now is about 160.

 

Is there a guide for setting up a zfs raidz2 pool? Would be curious to set one up and test the results. 

 

As I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering if I can get Veeam to interact with Unraid as NFS would also net some improvement over SMB. 

[JorgeB]

11 hours ago, GamerDad said:

Is there a guide for setting up a zfs raidz2 pool?

Just add a pool, assign the devices, click on it and set the filesystem to zfs and raidz, then start the array and format the pool.