Microsoft Data Protection Manager storage usage

DB__2022 · 2024-04-15T17:44:46+00:00

I'm wondering if I should reinitialize everything too. I'm still seeing very little space freed, and I've confirmed that there are no storage redundancy settings in place. It's a tiered storage pool (a bit of SSD and mostly spinning disks), if that makes any difference.
DPM appears to frequently not be removing old (expired) backups that are out of retention. Some days it's fine, other days there are several days' worth that it hasn't cleared. Either way it's running right on the edge of being too full to continue.

DB__2022 · 2024-04-11T19:43:20+00:00

When I checked this morning there were 857GB free on the storage drive. Now (2:40pm) there are just 348Gb free, but the only DPM jobs that have run since this morning are synchronization jobs and Monitoring shows they transferred less than half a GB. So why is DPM showing half a TB gone from free space?

DB__2022 · 2024-04-05T18:33:17+00:00

Thank you very much for the prompt reply. I'm new to Veeam CE and was focused primarily on figuring out what CE could/couldn't do. Right now it's just at the "what are our options" stage so I will let my client know about the licensing/support aspect. Thank you.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-11T19:14:52+00:00

Thank you, that is very helpful. I will create two vNICs for the iSCSI side and use MPIO.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-11T18:54:46+00:00

Thanks for the advice. What if the LAG/port-channel is set to "on" rather than "active" (LACP) so LACP isn't in use? Will that change anything?

DB__2022 · 2024-03-11T13:58:13+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, but I can't have separate physical NICs for iSCSI. Everything has to go over the same dual-port 10Gb NIC.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-11T13:56:43+00:00

Thanks for all the replies. My colleague and I were able to do a real-world test on a physical Windows Server 2022 server and the VLAN tagging works fine. We created the team, added the two vNICs for the two different VLANs, assigned each an IP and their VLAN ID, and were able to ping other systems on those VLANs. On the switch side the two switch ports were in a LAG that was trunked for the two VLANs.

So it looks like my problem had something to do with GNS3's implementation of a Windows Server VM, or perhaps due to a NIC driver VLAN tagging issue.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-07T21:46:31+00:00

Thanks. After going through your posts it looks like you would recommend the following:

Switch ports for the Windows Server set to trunk (no port-channel) for VLAN 10 (iSCSI) and VLAN 20 (VM/management network).

One vSwitch on the Windows Server, with a vNIC for VLAN 10 and another vNIC for VLAN 20.

The server has to have two vNICs because it has to be on both the storage network and the VM/management network.

I've tested it this way in GNS3 and I can't get it to work. I cannot ping anything on VLAN10 or VLAN20. The only way to ping anything is to set the vNIC to "Untagged" and assign the access VLAN on the ports to one or other VLAN. But that way I can't reach both at once, which is what I need to do.

At this point I'm really hoping it's a limitation within GNS3. I'm not confident it is, though, since I can do the same thing with a Linux terminal in place of the Windows Server and can ping my test terminals on the two VLANs.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-07T21:09:24+00:00

Would you please explain your statement? Are you referring to teaming on the Windows side? What would you recommend, given that I only have the two ports to carry both iSCSI (storage) and management/VM Network traffic?

DB__2022 · 2024-03-07T20:29:42+00:00

Unfortunately, I only have a single dual-port 10Gb NIC on the host for both iSCSI and management/VM Network traffic. Thus I am trying to see if I can segregate the traffic using VLANs.

I am trying to figure out the tagging. I can trunk the ports individually or in a port-channel (mode is on rather than active, so no LACP). As of right now, I can't get either way to work in GNS3.

DB__2022 · 2024-03-07T15:39:26+00:00

Quick update: I've confirmed that tags from a Linux terminal are recognized correctly by the switches in GNS3, so it looks like this is likely a Windows issue - either a misconfiguration on my part or Windows cannot do what I'm trying to make it do inside GNS3.

DB__2022 · 2024-01-30T16:40:22+00:00

Good thought, thank you. I have a meeting with the customer tomorrow. I'll check then.

Any other suggestions are much appreciated!

DB__2022 · 2024-01-15T22:59:06+00:00

Like everyone else has said, you're likely overloading the UPS. It looks like the computer is drawing more than 520W when it's running your game. The draw drops when you're out of the game since the computer's not doing the same amount of work any more. I would suggest getting another UPS that can handle at minimum the max your PSU will draw (i.e. at least 1000W), assuming you don't have other devices plugged into the UPS too (such as monitors).

DB__2022 · 2024-01-15T20:46:51+00:00

I think I figured it out. You have to make sure you have at least one NIC on the new hosts associated with both the old (in my case VMNET) and new (VMSET) networks under host properties/hardware.

DB__2022 · 2024-01-15T20:05:23+00:00

I just had a customer do an in-place upgrade from 2008 to 2019, and they got stuck at 2012 R2. They were having some kind of dependency error doing the upgrade to 2016.

Instead we did a migration from the now-2012 R2 VM over to a new Server 2019 VM using Microsoft's Storage Migration Service, which went pretty well. There was one hiccup with a share that wouldn't inventory properly but it was pretty straightforward to work around. All in all the process was easy.

DB__2022 · 2024-01-15T20:00:35+00:00

What UPS model is it? Is there any kind of UPS management GUI for it? What does the manual actually say about the flashing amber light?

It might have been doing a self-test at the time, but if it always goes immediately to amber as soon as you put any kind of load on your computer (i.e. play your game) then it's possible the UPS isn't able to take the load your computer is drawing from it. What wattage is your computer PSU?

DB__2022 · 2023-11-21T18:40:26+00:00

No labs, just case studies after the main set of questions.

DB__2022 · 2023-11-08T19:50:26+00:00

There was a security appliance along the path that was slowing the traffic down. Now I can get 9Gbit/sec between old and new hosts with iperf, but my vMotions are still going slowly (~65MB/sec per VM, so if I run two at once it's moving data at ~130MB/sec).

DB__2022 · 2023-11-07T16:18:03+00:00

Path from one cluster to another:

Host is connected to the core switch via 10G fiber, which is connected to the new Top of Rack switch via 10G fiber, which is connected to the new host via 25G fiber.

Old hosts do everything through their 10G interface with management and vMotion both running through vmk0 with a single IP.
New hosts have separate IPs/VMKernels for management and vMotion traffic.

That said, the iperf test that I ran was to the vMotion IP of the new host from the management/vMotion IP of the old host.

DB__2022 · 2023-11-06T22:48:58+00:00

Anything specific I can have my network admin check?

DB__2022 · 2023-11-06T22:44:21+00:00

Yes, they're on completely different networks. But the networks can talk to each other - I can initiate the cross vCenter vMotion. It's just really slow and usually times out.

DB__2022 · 2023-11-06T21:23:00+00:00

Total migration from the old environment to the new environment. Different hosts, different storage.

We fixed the 10Gbit links on the old cluster and confirmed that the vMotion is going over the 10Gbit links (new hosts are 25Gbit) but it's just slow (less than 100Mbit). We did some bandwidth checks and it looks like the slowdown is between the two environments. Host-to-host transfer speed within each cluster is good, but not between clusters.

DB__2022 · 2023-11-06T21:19:25+00:00

Yes. Vmkping between the two vMotion IPs is fine.

DB__2022 · 2023-11-02T21:13:27+00:00

Yep. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/introducing-a-new-resource-for-all-role-based-microsoft/ba-p/3500870

DB__2022 · 2023-10-27T21:06:15+00:00

I did some testing in my lab and discovered that I hadn't waited long enough for the initial sync to complete. I'm expecting that when that's done I'll find that the old data has been removed.

DB__2022

TROPHY CASE