[Info-vax] NetBackup Performance Woes

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-20 14:22:50 +0000, Geek Nerdly said:

> Have experienced severe resource consumption by NetBackup release 7.5.  
> This problem can bring a node to its knees, and that at times affects 
> the whole cluster.

Did this ever work right, or is this a new issue?    Which particular 
resources are being consumed?   Disk I/O bandwidth would be typical of 
a backup tool.  Other resources or quotas?   Is it possible that the 
disks are severely fragmented?    Maybe the network performance is 
limited?

Various existing OpenVMS servers — you've not mentioned the OpenVMS 
version or architecture or server or storage involved — are pretty 
slow, too.

> Symantec provides no guidelines for tuning process quotas for their 
> backup agent to balance throughput vs. resource consumption.  Their 
> documentation only states that there are process quotas and they can be 
> tuned.  Their support is lacking knowledge, experience (with OpenVMS at 
> least) or interest in being of useful assistance.
> 
> Does anyone out there have any experience or guidelines for approaching 
> this problem specifically with NetBackup?
> Many thanks in advance.

FWIW, page 91 of the 7.1 documentation 
<http://clientui-kb.symantec.com/resources/sites/BUSINESS/content/live/DOCUMENTATION/4000/DOC4238/en_US/NetBackup_UserGuide_OpenVMS.pdf> 
indicates the recommended mechanism for throttling performance is via 
the LIMIT_BANDWIDTH setting, while page 89 has the recommended minimum 
quotas.  There's some network-tuning information on page 46.   I'd 
suspect the backup will consume all possible resources until and unless 
throttled due to skewed quota settings or I/O limits.


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