Hi all,
we have a fairly large vSphere 5.0 environment with 2x vCenter servers, each with ca. 2000 VMs using about 600 TB of FC-attached SAN storage.
The majority (~90%) of these VMs are backed up with Symantec NetBackup 7.5 via the vStorage API (doing VMware snapshots through vCenter).
While the environment was growing the backup environment also grew by adding more and more media servers to it. But we are still using only one vCenter server per location.
Since a while we are having trouble with a growing number of backup job failures: It looks like the backup servers' connections to vCenter sometimes fail or time out in the middle of a job.
And the vCenter servers (VMs with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM) appear to be heavily loaded (esp. CPU, but also RAM).
My question here is: Does this happen, because we have reached an architectural limit of such kind of backup setup? Or in other words: Do we need to add additional vCenter servers and spread hosts and VMs among them?
We expect further growth of this environment and need to take a decision quickly. I cannot provide any details about how the backups are done right now. I'd just like to hear some opinions from people who run comparable environments and also use snapshot based backups. Should one vCenter server be able to handle backups of more than 2000 VMs? Is it worth trying to scale up the one vCenter server?
Thanks for any comments!
Andreas