Performance issues with DPM 2010 backup on Hyper-V cluster

[guest]

I have a 3 node Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster with a cluster shared volume on a Dell MD3200i iSCSI SAN. When using DPM 2010 to protect the virtual machines on the cluster at times I get good backup speeds of about 3.5Gb/min. However, most of the time the speeds are more like 50Mb/Min.

I have tried the following:

· Configured DPM for serialized backups (prior to doing so I got a Microsoft-Windows-FailoverClustering Event ID 1584 error in the application event log.)

· Turned off TCP/IP offload on the cluster and DPM server. (no effect on backup speeds)

· Uninstalled the Dell VSS Hardware Provider (SmProvider.exe) software. The VSS Hardware provider is NOT supported on CSV. (Prior to the uninstall I got a SmProvider Event ID 3007 error in the application event log.)

· Set the computer throttle on the DPM agent to the max on the cluster nodes.

· Installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. (no effect on backup speeds)

I understand that I would take a performance hit due to serializing the backups. However, my problem is not due to this. At times the backups happen fast with great throughput on the iSCSI NICs to the SAN and great throughput on the Hyper-V Server Host NIC to the DPM server. Then at other times, the throughput on the NICs is just a fraction of what it should be. The NIC utilization is otherwise low and it is not a resource contention issue.

The issue seems to be a problem with the taking of the snapshot on the iSCSI SAN.

I have a case open with Microsoft and Dell, but to date I’ve not gotten a resolution.

Any help would be appreciated.

I've posted more details on my blog here... http://wp.drewhill.net/?p=1329

[guest]

Uninstalling the hardware provider shouldn't affect iSCSI at all you're simply removing the ability to create a hardware-based VSS snapshot for the LUNs presented to the machine you're uninstalling it from. As far as MDSM is concerned you may want to post this out on the Dell support forum to get an answer. As for the snapshot license, I'm assuming you wouldn't need in lieu of uninstalling the hardware provider but again, please pose this question to Dell for an accurate answer.

If the suggested answer does not help in resolving this thread then please re-open it.


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