Category Archives: VMware

VMware VDP – Limit number of concurrent backups

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We recently had a little issue with one of our vmware 5.5 clusters. – Backups started running and our lowly nexcenta iSCSI SAN appliance couldn’t handle the extra I/O.

By default, vDP (vSphere Data Protection) will run up to eight concurrent backups at a time, if you have 8 or more VM backups specified in the same job. There is no way to change this in the vmware web gui or vSphere client.
There is however, an unsupported workaround: 

  • SSH to your VDP appliance
  • cd /usr/local/avamarclient/etc/
  • ./registerproxy.sh

You will be presented with an interactive prompt. Hit return on the first prompt. You are then asked how many “proxies” you want to use. The default is 8 proxies. Choose a lower number to suit your requirements, such as 4 perhaps. Hit return and that’s it. No more than 4 backups will run at one time. Woop!

DISCLAIMER: This is not supported by vmware. You are editing the number of ‘proxies’ that vdp uses to run backup jobs. Apply these settings at your own risk.

Thanks to http://onevirtual.wordpress.com for this information. I can confirm it worked for me.