Greetings all,
We would like to share something with the community to see if we are experiencing something unique or something that is known to others.
We recently moved from using Trend Server Protect to Symantec End Point Protection as our Windows Server Virus Scanning platform with both our VDI and Physical Server environments. Our VDI environment is built on the following components,
- VMWARE ESX 5.5
- Windows Server 2008 + a small amount of Windows Server 2012.
- Symantec End Point Protection 12.1.5
- DataOntap 7-Mode Versions 8.0.3, 8.1.2, 8.2.2 & Cluster-Mode Version 8.2.2
Points of note are,
DataStores are mounted using different protocols - NFS, FC & iSCSI
We use VSC 5.0 to backup our VMWARE data and SnapVault to move the data offsite.
Deduplication runs daily prior to the VSC job running
VM guest Transient data is hosted within a dedicated Datastore as recommended in NETAPP best practices. Interestingly the volumes hosting transient data are also showing the 200 - 400% increase recorded on the actual Data Hosting volumes.
Impact is seemingly equal regardless of protocol used and Ontap revision ruling our certain known bugs.
Tape backups of Physical Servers have not shown any notable increase.
Our Symantec End Point (SEP) configuration is based on the following principles.
- We keep 90 Virus Definitions. On average 3 updates daily
- Definition updates are delta based as opposed to full (or so I have been informed!)
- Downloads are random and we have no control over when they happen - This means that pattern files downloads can happen post deduplication and pre VSC job instigation.
Since we migrated to SEP we have encountered quite a serious issue - our daily snapvault snapshot sizes have increased by 200 - 400% from where they were before the migration. This is having an impact on the length of time the transfers take causing backup jobs to over run into working hours and it is causing an explosion in storage space consumption. As I am sure you might imagine the scale of this impact is proving rather problematic. For a short period we switched off Pattern File updates and the snapshot sizes reverted the original figures. Once we switched back on pattern file downloads the Snapshot size increase reoccurred.
We have been in touch with both NETAPP Technical Support and Symantec Technical Support both of whom are being helpful. The impression however is that neither vendor has seen an impact from deployment quite like ours. We therefore want to share this experience with the community to see if anyone else has experience anything similar.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
best regards.
D