Acronis vmProtect: Slow Backup/Replication Speed in Virtual Appliance-Based Installation

This article describes how to deal with the situations when the Virtual Appliance backup/replication performance is low

This article applies to:

• Acronis vmProtect

Symptoms

The backup/replication is performed using NBD (network) mode due to missing vSphere Hot-add feature - this is a limitation of the vSphere licensing - see Acronis vmProtect 7: Supported Environments. The backup/replication speed however is much lower than expected (for example 5 MB/s instead of 20-30 MB/s) taking into account the available bandwidth of the network interfaces.

Cause

The most probable cause is that Acronis vmProtect Virtual Appliance is using "flexible" network card type by default and in some cases this may cause low performance.

Solution

The solution is to change the network card from "flexible" to "VMXNET 3" type in the settings of the Virtual Appliance:

1. Turn off the Virtual Appliance and upgrade virtual hardware:

2. In the settings of the Virtual Appliance go to the Options tab, change the Operating System to Other 2.6.x Linux (32 bit) and apply the changes by clicking OK button:

   (!) Applying the changes is important, since otherwise it will not be possible to follow the instructions from the next steps.

3. Remove the network card from the Hardware tab and add a new network adapter of "VMXNET 3" type:

4. Apply the changes and power on the Virtual Appliance. The network configuration will remain intact and will be applied to the newly added network card (i.e. the network settings will not be lost).

More information

Besides the above solution, there is a workaround to use Acronis vmProtect Windows Agent instead of Virtual Appliance, since in this case there will be native Windows OS network drivers used and thus there will be no issues with the network performance.

In the future versions of Acronis vmProtect the Virtual Appliance virtual hardware version will be increased up to 7 (supported by ESX(i) 4.0+) and the network adapter type will be "VMXNET 3" by default, so this issue will no longer be actual.