During a recent blog post, I used the DPM integration with Azure to backup some of my content in my home lab to the cloud. Pretty soon after I started my backup, the complaints started coming in from the other users of this Internet connection. Quotes included “Why is NetFlix so slow?”, and “Who’s taking up all the bandwidth!” pretty much summarized the impact of the throttled transfer of data to the cloud for my backup (yep, my lab run at home on my non-business class Internet connection). For my connection in this environment, I have a latency of less than 20 ms, speed of just under 15 Mbps down and just under 1 Mbps up. (see the graphic below which shows the www.speedtest.net run from my environment).
When I was performing the backup to Azure, it was working as expected but negatively impacting my network connection as a result. A screenshot showing the significantly increased ping times (approximately 500 ms) during a non-throttled data transfer is shown below.
A normal ping time in the environment is shown below after cancelling the backup to the cloud:
It became very important for me to figure out how to throttle this traffic if I was going to let this backup complete successfully and still have relative peace and calm at home. So I emailed a friend (like a phone-a-friend, but more techno-savvy) and asked Mike Resseler (probably the best DPM guy I know) if there is a way to throttle this because I hadn’t seen it when I configured my environment. Mike was extremely helpful and pointed me to the setting which lets us throttle bandwidth for the Azure backup from DPM.
To set the throttling configuration, open the management pane, Online, right-click on the Online subscription and click on the configure button as shown below:
What I found was that my current DPM 2012 SP1 server could not use throttling because it was running on Windows Server 2008 R2. It was grayed out as an option as shown below where it indicates that this function is only available on Windows Server 2012 and above.
After a few minutes of frustration at this, I realized that they must be using some of the new functionality available in Windows 2012 (potentially QOS?) to provide this functionality. Since this is my lab environment, I decided it was time to take a snapshot of my DPM server and upgrade it to Windows 2012! I used VMM to mount the Windows 2012 DVD, ran the upgrade and got ready to restore my snapshot. The cool thing is, it upgraded with no issues to Windows 2012. After re-logging in, and re-launching the DPM console the throttling setting was no longer grayed out so I configured it as shown below to take up to 256 Kbps during work hours (7 am – 11 pm) and 512 Kbps outside of those work hours.
With throttling in place the backup is continuing without issue, and impacts on the ping times are no longer significant as shown below.
