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DPTIPS: Revving up your Windows 2008 Media Agent Server

Mr_T| February 2, 2013 - last edited March 14, 2013
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This is a summary of actions taken to resolve performance issues after a Cell Manager (CM) migration I performed recently.  The legacy CM was on a 32-bit Windows 2003 system which also served as the Media Agent (MA) host for all network backups.  The new CM/MA host is a Proliant DL585 G7 with numerous CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM running Windows 2008 R2 64-bit.  It should be a beast of a machine compared to its predecessor, right?  It wasn't.  At least, at first.

 

Windows 2008 offers many groovy new features, but it brings along with it some baggage that can produce undesirable behavior with Data Protector.  If you use 2008 to host the MA's for network-based backups, here are the specific steps you should take.

 

omnirc

For DP 6.2 and beyond, edit the omnirc file and add these two variables:

 

OB2IPCNOSENDRECVLOOP=1
OB2SHMIPC=0

Details can be found in the notice titled Performance got worse after update to 6.20.  These two parameters are essential for DP 7.x as well as 6.2x.  You'll find your omnirc file located in C:\ProgramData\OmniBack\.

 

Power Management

Next change the power management setting from Balanced to High Performance.  You can reach this setting via Control Panel > Power Options.

 

PowerMgmt.jpg

 

The last thing you want is the system throttling down the CPU voltage and speed in the middle of a backup!

 

TCP Autotuning

Finally, you need to disable TCP AutoTuning and Receive Side Scaling with these easy steps.  Open an elevated command prompt with administrator rights.  Type the following commands and press Enter:

 

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled

 

Now simply reboot the host.

 

Results

Making the prescribed changes to TCP autotuning, power management, and omnirc increased our test backup throughput from 13 MB/s to over 100 MB/s which is much more consistent with what we expected to see on the new host.  Your mileage will vary, of course.  But there's no mistaking in this case that we did the right thing.

 

Do you have some lessons learned from a Cell Manager migration?  If so, please share them in the comments!

 

 

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Tags: DataProtector
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Mr_T | ‎02-02-2013 11:25 PM
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Note also that Scott McIntosh was instrumental in the success documented in this article.  It demonstrates the value of paid support from HP which provides access to Response Center resources like Scott.

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