Slow performance for a single tenant database backup of the SAP HANA system

When backing up a small (<128 GB)  tenant/system DB of SAP HANA, the backup performance might be comparatively slower than a file based backup or using a different backup solution. 

After several customers pointed out the performance degradation – compared to file based backups – the Veeam development team found a way to significantly reduce the overhead for single stream-backups which leads to higher performance and faster backup times. This also improves the use of multi-channel backups – as the number of channels can be significantly smaller. 

There is a hotfix for the issue which improves backup performance and eliminates the overhead of backup operations. Follow the next steps to apply the hotfix. 

1. Make sure the Veeam Backup and Replication server and Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA have been upgraded to version 9.5.4.2753

2. Make sure no database backups are running for your SAP HANA server 

3. Log in to server as root user 

4. Download https://storage.veeam.com/Fix_168163_6a3408d4d4.zip archive containing the fix to SAP HANA server 

5. Unpack it using the following command: 

   unzip Fix_168163_6a3408d4d4.zip

6. Verify checksums of the files using the following command:

   md5sum -c MD5.txt

   The result should be OK for each file

7. Perform the following commands 

   cp /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/hdbbackint /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/hdbbackint.bak 
   cp /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/SapBackintManager /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/SapBackintManager.bak 
   mv /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/hdbbackint /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/hdbbackint.orig 
   mv /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/SapBackintManager /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/SapBackintManager.orig 
   cp hdbbackint /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/ 
   cp SapBackintManager /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/ 
   chmod 755 /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/hdbbackint 
   chmod 755 /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforSAPHANA/SapBackintManager 	 
   

8. Continue running backups as usual