Number of Proxies

bpras 11 posts since 14-Jul-2012 Number of Proxies 19-Feb-2013 17:34

Good Morning,

Is there a limit on the number of vadp proxies per vcenter for Avamar 6.1 image level backup?

Regards, Binod
Tags: avamar, 6.1

RudreshReddy 14 posts since 01-Feb-2013 Re: Number of Proxies 20-Feb-2013 04:30

The number of proxies are configured based on the number of existing VM's in the vCenter, it is usually 20 VM's per proxy. Not sure how they calculate per vCenter basis.

Thanks Rudresh

aj2546 42 posts since 19-Oct-2010 Re: Number of Proxies 20-Feb-2013 04:47 in response to RudreshReddy

20 VMs per proxy, does that mean I can run 20 backups at once? Or am I still limited to 1 VM backup per proxy at a time?

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bpras 11 posts since 14-Jul-2012 Re: Number of Proxies 20-Feb-2013 13:28

Thanks Rudresh,

I am looking for the number of proxy we can have per vCenter for Avamar 6.1.

Thanks Binod

J.H. 51 posts since 07-Mar-2012 Re: Number of Proxies 27-Feb-2013 14:20

I am running 6.1 and I have 20 proxies I heard you might be able to do more in 6.1 but no where in the manual does it say so which I assume you already know.

So we need to know from an EMC tech - how many proxies can you have....

J.H. 51 posts since 07-Mar-2012 Re: Number of Proxies 27-Feb-2013 14:25 in response to RudreshReddy

RudreshReddy - so you are saying for every 20 vm's we should make a proxy - so if I have 1000 vm's its ok to make 50 proxies? I know there was a limit to the number you should have. I have just never been able to find any guide on that.

JWeinsheimer 41 posts since 29-Mar-2012 Re: Number of Proxies 28-Feb-2013 07:50 in response to J.H.

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Number of Proxies

If there's no limit documented I would assume you can can install as many as your environment can needs.

RICHF 1 posts since 10-Apr-2008 Re: Number of Proxies 01-Mar-2013 04:10

Here's the best answer to the maximum number of proxies question I have been able to find. This info came Avamar Escalation 4916 (6.1.0-333 server) and has been paraphrased for easy reading.

In summary:
1. The best practice is to limit the number of proxies to 48 (Comment #31). This best practice is undocumented at this time (Comment # 31 - 2012-08-24) . 2. 700 VM's is not out of the ordinary and could be handled with less than 20 proxies in a 6 hour backup window (Comment #33). 3. If the customer needs more than 48 proxies then adjust the groups and have them run at different times so that there is no more than 48 proxies in use at the same time (Comment #34).

In this case the customer reduced the number of proxies to 48 and resolved their performance issue.

It appears the 20 VMs to 1 proxy rule-of-thumb may be outdated or #3 needs to be enforced if they need more than 48 due to the number of datastores in use.

fdxpilot 78 posts since 15-Jan-2012 Re: Re: Number of Proxies 05-Mar-2013 20:17 in response to RICHF

Small world. I believe we were the customer that was the subject of escalation 4916. It took months and many, many escalations and conversations with our account team, support, and engineering but this is the response we finally received from some pretty senior folks in Avamar engineering:

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Number of Proxies

The 48 proxy limit is a QA issue it is the max we have tested with. If the customer installs more, it puts them in questionable support territory. Before reducing the number of proxies, we were seeing a lot of backup jobs cancelled each night. The 48 proxy "limit" is supposed to be enforced in later versions of Avamar. We were also directed to not start backups for more than 15 proxies simultaneously. So we ended up scheduling the Avamar group for each of our vSphere clusters to start at 15 minute intervals. The reason we needed so many proxies wasn't as much for backup window considerations as it was a side effect of the number of vSphere clusters we have. We wanted all backups to use hot add transport and the hosts in each cluster share common storage (and no storage is shared between hosts in different clusters). This necessitated sufficient proxies in each cluster to backup the VMs in that cluster -- with a minimum of two proxies per cluster for redundancy. Backups have been running well with 48 proxies and some utility node memory tuning.

ianderson 538 posts since 07-Apr-2009 Re: Re: Number of Proxies 06-Mar-2013 05:58 in response to fdxpilot

fdxpilot, you have an excellent memory. I just checked the customer name for Esc 4916 and guess who I found...

SystemMangler 17 posts since 01-Mar-2012 Re: Number of Proxies 08-Mar-2013 11:42 in response to fdxpilot

I too went through this pain recently, 700+ VMs with 50%+ failure rates with "Timed out response" error. Took a long long time to identify the number of proxies as the issue. Client had 72 ESX host VMware farms and our original design a called for 1 host : 1 proxy.

In the proxy logs, it complained of no connections available to the MCS server which had 32 max, 5 of which used for the vCenter. Once we dropped the number of proxies down to 20-25 the failures went away.

I Would love to know how you manage to use 48 as this environment is only going to grow further. Client is running 6.1SP1.

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And I hope the documentation has been updated to reflect the limit

Jonathan

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