XenServer backup: compress or not compress?

Olivier Lambert

• 1 min read

When you export a VM (eg for backup purpose) in XenServer, you can use (or not) the built-in compression of the XAPI.

In the coming 4.9 version of Xen Orchestra, you can select "Disable compression" for your XenServer scheduled backups:

Let's try to compare a backup with and without compression activated, on the same VM.

Without compression:

  • 25 MB/s throughput to the NFS share
  • time: 1m50
  • 2.1 GB file

With compression:

  • 8 MB/s speed to the NFS share
  • time: 2m13
  • 0,5 GB file

The graph recap the VM export (host stats):

That's pretty clear, first test (w/o compression):

  • more bandwidth used
  • less CPUs
  • higher load average (waiting for the storage because of the high throughput)

On the network graph, you could see the difference: the lighest line is the link toward the NFS (write speed). Without compression, the NFS write speed is the bottleneck.

In details:

With the compression, the bottleneck is the compression speed of the XenServer host.

Conclusion: with our limited write speed on our NFS repo, compression is the best choice: 30% longer, but only 25% of the uncompressed file size.

If your storage can sustain much higher throughput, the answer could be really different.

Do you a small backup storage and you have time to backup? Compress.

If your NFS target is fast and support deduplication, avoid compression (dedup can't work on compressed XVAs).