This article is for Zmanda Backup Appliance (ZBA)
Following changes can be made to the ZBA virtual machine and VMware hypervisor to improve ZBA backup server performance before it is put in production:
- Upgrade VMware Hardware level to a level the VMware hypervisor supports. Please see VMware KB article on supported hardware levels by various VMware products.
- Upgrade VMware tools on the ZBA
- Change the ZBA vmx file to use more recent networking drivers
- Increase the memory allocated to the ZBA to 2GB (recommended)
- Increase the number of virtual CPUs allocated to ZBA to 4 (recommended)
- Prevent oversubscription of resources. If too many VMs are running on the hypervisor during backup runs, the backups might fail due to lack of resources.
- Put ZBA data stores on iSCSI as opposed to NFS or CIFS shares.
- For AE 3.1 and earlier, change the TEMPDIR in /etc/zmanda/zmc_aee/zmc_user_dumptypes file on the Amanda server from /tmp/amanda to /var/lib/amanda/amvmware if you are backing up VMware virtual machines.
- Total disk space available for backups, staging area is around 120GB by default. You should increase the space available by adding additional disks before performing backups. Please see How to increase the size of backup disk on the Zmanda Backup Appliance for steps to increase storage on the ZBA.
