@acebmxer I may just need to re-evaluate our backup strategy and adjust it so there is more time for the backups, I could also just run the daily delta's, the main issue is the weekly fulls that I run as a precaution, I'm always paranoid about something happening with the daily delta chain and having an unusable backup so i also pull dedicated weekly full backups which take a lot of time to run.

I've also considered running the full backups at different days to spread them out more, sounds like one of those is my best option rather than adding more cost/complexity.

@acebmxer Good to know, that would change my feelings on that solution. We're a K12 school so money is not overly abundant.

@Pilow That sounds like it would give the desired results without any pool changes, I'll look into that setup, thanks!

So we have 2 hosts(no shared storage) currently in a pool, am I correct in thinking our backup jobs would be able to run faster if each host was it's own pool/master? I was told the backups always run via the pool master meaning when I am pulling backups from each box it's limited by the master where if both hosts were in their own pool backups could run from both at the same time.

Are there any other downsides to having each host in it's own pool? It seems like most of the pool features are more for setups with shared storage where you can migrate vm's by moving the memory instead of the storage, I never do rolling pool updates currently because it would take days to migrate our vm's between the two hosts as each host has it's own physical storage containing vm's.

Just looking for some thoughts to make sure I'm not causing myself more trouble or missing some critical info before I change anything.

Both hosts are running Sata SSD storage with 10G links(dedicated management as well as separate link for vm traffic), backup server is just running sas hdd's so not lightning fast but also has a 10g link.

Hosts are managed via XOA.