Advanced Bandwidth Throttling

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is designed to transfer data at the maximum available speeds to complete VM backup, replication, and recovery jobs as efficiently as possible. However, running data protection jobs during business hours can overload your LAN or WAN networks. This may impact the performance of business applications and degrade user experience—for example, causing delays in email delivery or slow website loading times. To address this challenge, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the flexible Advanced Bandwidth Throttling feature. With this feature, you can set limits on your data protection jobs to ensure they never consume more bandwidth than you can allocate.

The Advanced Bandwidth Throttling feature allows you to create global rules that control the data transfer speeds used by your backup processes. These rules can be applied to multiple jobs and scheduled according to your operational requirements. For instance, you can define a global rule that restricts backup jobs to 50 MB/s during business hours while leaving bandwidth usage unrestricted on Sundays. If you require more precise control, you can also configure bandwidth throttling rules on a per-job basis. Individual limits override global rules, eliminating the need to adjust global settings for each job.

The Advanced Bandwidth Throttling feature of NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an effective way to optimize backup operations and manage network traffic. By applying both global and individual limits to data transfer speeds, the feature helps ensure that your business applications maintain consistent performance—even when bandwidth is limited. With these bandwidth rules, the solution can restrict LAN or WAN usage by NAKIVO Backup & Replication jobs to a specific, predefined amount.

For more information, refer to the following sections:

About Bandwidth Rules

A bandwidth rule defines the amount of bandwidth that can be used by one job, several jobs, or all applicable jobs. When a job with multiple VMs runs under an active bandwidth rule, the available bandwidth is automatically distributed among the job’s tasks.

Bandwidth rules apply to the following NAKIVO Backup & Replication jobs:

  • Backup Jobs for:

    • VMware

    • Hyper-V

    • Nutanix AHV

    • Amazon EC2

    • Physical Machines

    • Proxmox VE

    • VMware Cloud Director

  • Backup Copy Jobs (Disk to Disk, Disk to Tape)

  • Full VM Recovery Jobs for:

    • VMware

    • Hyper-V

    • Nutanix AHV

    • Amazon EC2

    • Physical Machines (P2V)

    • Proxmox VE

    • VMware Cloud Director

  • Instant VM Recovery Job for:

    • VMware

    • Hyper-V

    • Physical Machines (P2V)

    • Proxmox VE

  • Recovery from tape

  • Replication Jobs for:

    • VMware

    • Hyper-V

    • Proxmox VE

  • Replica Failback/Failover Jobs for:

    • VMware

    • Hyper-V

Bandwidth rules may be always active, active on schedule, or disabled. Refer to Bandwidth Throttling for more details.

A bandwidth rule can be:

  • Global Rule – a bandwidth rule applied to all supported Jobs (see the supported jobs list above).

  • Per Job Rule – a bandwidth rule associated with and applied to specific supported Job(s).

Per Job rules have higher priority than Global Rules. A per job rule will be applied to the job when both the per job rule and a global rule are active for the same job.

Up to 100 bandwidth rules can be created and enforced at the level of a Single-tenant product or a Tenant of a Multi-tenant product. These rules are applied at the Transporter level, stored by the Director, and enforced when processing of a job object begins, provided that the job object falls within the scope of the active rules. Each rule can be enabled or disabled individually.

When enabled, a rule limits the bandwidth of all Job Object Data Transfers (JODTs) that fall under that rule.

Note

Keep in mind that if the job starts when the Bandwidth throttling rule is active, it will stay at that speed even if the rule time is over.