I've recently implemented a NVSD for vRanger repository in my environment with the following spec's and looking for advise on how to improve the times moving data from Staging to Chunk - currently the staging are is being consumed at a higher rate than the deduplication process is taking.
Here's a brief overview of my environment:
vRanger Servers
2 x Dell R710, 24GB RAM, Dual Westmere X5620 (8 Core + hyperthreaded) with 8GB Fiber, 2 x 1GB NICs for LAN backups (Link Aggrogate Group - for 2GB speed) and 2 x 1GB NICs for LAN backups (Link Aggrogate Group - for 2GB speed) a 2GB LAG'ed NICs over a private backup network to the NVSD server
Backups are performed over FC where possible with LAN as a backup interface using a 14 day retention period with a full every 6 days.
NVSD for vRanger Server
Dell R710, 24GB RAM, Dual Westmere X5620 (8 Core + hyperthreaded) with 2GB LAG'ed NICs on a private backup network. Staging disc is RAID10, with two LUNs presented as staging (10.9TB and a 12.7TB). Chunk store is RAID5 14.5TB LUN, all storage is SAS6 direct attached Dell MD3200/MD1200 7.2K SATA disc
Staging 12.7TB over 14 Spindles
Staging 10.9TB over 12 Spindles
Chunk 14.5TB over 9 Spindles
Our ESX Environment
32 ESX servers hosting 450 VM's running in a primerily ESXi5 environment with some small ESX4.1 & ESXi4.1 clusters
Current injest of a full backup is around 8TB with incrementals around 2TB a day incremental.
Changes that have been made from the default NVSD configuration is as follows:
Deduplicators Active = 24 (default=4)
Dedplication Activity Cap = 16 (per repository)
In an attempt to get our staging store freed of some space Garbage Collection has been disabled (as takes presidences over deduplication) and Deduplication Compression has been turned off (more to seeif compression has a big impact on the process or not)
I've attached the current config and NVSD stats.
A second NVSD licese has been purchased and begrudgingly, have available hardware that could host a second NVSD server as fearing we maybe over taxing the environment.
Any advise on how to improve DeDupe timesor how to improve the performance of my NVSD for vRanger implementation would be appreciated