Switch Datastore from CIFS to NFS

floh

Active Member
Jul 19, 2018
62
5
28
Hello!

I was testing the performance of PBS backups over the network a few weeks ago using CIFS.

Somewhere here on the forum I found a quite useful thread with which I got cifs to working.
(Mount cifs share somewhere in /mnt using fstab and create a datastore with the cli).

I wasn't happy about the speed of the backup from PVE-->PBS-->SynologyNAS.
Using CIFS all I was able to achieve was 40-60 MB/s in reality. Which isn't what I was looking for. (40-60MB/s write speed according to the PVE-Interface when backupping)
(Hold in mind, that the network cables are 10GBit)


So first I said: ok, that's it - I have to deal with that. Using incremental backups only the initial backups should take long.
But also incremental backups takes many hours (300+ VMs).

So I just tried to use NFS because that's a bit more native to linux.
Using the benchmark-tool provided by PBS there isn't much of a difference.
Here are results of the benchmark using NFS:
TLS: 850 MB/s
SHA256: 480 MB/s
ZStd compression: 700 MB/s
ZStd decompression: 1100 MB/s
verification: 330 MB/s
AES256: 2800 MB/s

So in my opinion they are good enough.

As I said I switched from using CIFS to NFS.
Now the real backup-speed is between 120 and 180 MB/s. So I assume using NFS is more performant than CIFS in general (at least in my setup).

I'm now using the following fstab config:
#//10.50.0.134/BackupsPBS /mnt/synology cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentialssynology,rw,uid=34,noforceuid,gid=34,noforcegid 0 0
10.50.0.134:volume1/BackupsPBS /mnt/synology nfs rsize=4096,wsize=4096,timeo=14,intr 0 0

As you can see the fist line is the previously used CIFS mount. The mounting-point is still the same: "/mnt/synology".
But I cannot see those previous backups in the PBS-Gui (also not in the PVE-Gui) - I can list all entries in the cli (with the root user).
I think the PBS-Service can't see the old files because of some right issues.

Can someone help me here?
Is it possible to use all previous made backups using CIFS now with NFS? (same directory on nas, same PBS server, I only changed the transfer protocol)


Also last but not least: I would like to improve the speed - if someone know how to opimize the NFS traffic even more (maybe use bigger rsize/wsize like 8192?) I would appreciate that.

Kind regards,
Floh
 
PS: since I switched from CIFS to NFS all GUI-data (like "show me that's in content" or in the summary of the datastore) is much faster.
Using CIFS it took 1-3 sec until all data got displayed. Now using NFS the data is displayed <1sec.
 

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