Performance Test for disks using Data Protector

If you feel your backups runs too long there can be many reasons for that, slow tape drives, a saturated network, etc. Sometimes the clients to backup does not deliver the data as required, maybe the disks are too slow. A good way to to test the performance of a server is using a null device. If you need faster results and no configuration within Data Protector you can test the server performance using the binary vbda. VBDA – Volume Backup Disk Agent – normally reads the data and sent it to the media agent, however you can use VBDA to test the speed of your servers’s disks. With some parameterts a backup is simulated and as a result you get the read performance which would be achieved during the backup.

Example (Windows, Linux/Unix may differ):
"c:\program files\omniback\bin\vbda.exe" -vol /C -trees "/Windows/System32" -out nul -profile. The command starts a backup for volume C:, backups the tree /Windows/system32 (be careful with the separator). The backup will be done to a null device and will not require a configuration in DP beforehand. In addition statistical information is collected with -profile.

See the result as example:

[Normal] From: VBDA@consult-nb06 “” Time: 15.10.2013 08:03:08
STARTING Disk Agent for consult-nb06:/C “”.

[Normal] From: VBDA@consult-nb06 “” Time: 15.10.2013 08:03:51
Backup Profile:

Run Time ……….. 0:00:43
Backup Speed ……. 80,68 MB/s

[Normal] From: VBDA@consult-nb06 “” Time: 15.10.2013 08:03:51
Filesystem Statistics:

Directories …….. 1356
Regular files …… 17477
——————————
Objects Total …… 18833
Total Size ……… 3,39 GB

[Normal] From: VBDA@consult-nb06 “” Time: 15.10.2013 08:03:51
COMPLETED Disk Agent for consult-nb06:/C “”.

time: 43 (sec), tot: 0 (kB), done: 0 (%)