Managing Veeam Agent for Windows with Veeam 9.5 U3

Managed agents, Veeam, physical workloads, Whats that about then?

Well then, Veeam has come full circle from its roots as a virtual infrastructure backup platform, to a full availability suite. Offering backups to the public cloud, Veeam cloud connect and now full management for physical Windows and Linux workloads. The Veeam Agent for Windows, formerly Veeam Endpoint Backup, has existed since April 2015 so it’s not a new idea from Veeam, however central management of the agents with Veeam Backup and Replication is. Let’s take a look at what this looks like in Veeam 9.5 U3.

What does it look like?

To give you some background on my setup, I was using a Veeam 9.5 U2 server as a target backup repository for Veeam Agent for Windows 2.0 (VAW). Other than seeing the backups in the backup repositories, there was nothing else that could be done as far as management of the agents. Now the environment has been upgraded to 9.5 U3, there is a new Inventory section where the agents can be managed from (or left unmanaged). One thing to note, passing management of the Agent to the Veeam Backup and Replication console removes the ability to edit the job schedule locally on the agent. The task tray icon is removed from the endpoint and it can not be ran. A paid for license also has to be applied to allow central management of the agent. I will cover this further down in the post. I am also only covering Workstation agent rather than the Server agent. its the same agent, just different license SKU.

 

Overview prior to Veeam Agent for Windows upgrades.

VAW_2.1_2

Clicking properties on Win7Demo shows some details, but it thinks the agent is not installed.

VAW_2.1_3

On the desktop we can still see the task tray icon is present.

VAW_2.1_4

And the current agent edition – Free, managed by VBR server

VAW_2.1_5

VAW Upgrade and Management.

At this point, everything looks good. We would like to upgrade the Veeam Agent to the latest version and initiate that upgrade from the Veeam Backup and Replication server. Veeam has a concept of protection groups. This is a group of agents that a common backup policy can be applied to. Agents can either be added manually or by Active Directory lookup. THe agents need to reside in a protection group before an agent upgrade can be initiated.

Right click the existing agent and move to new protection group.

VAW_2.1_6

Give the protection group a name.

VAW_2.1_7

I am adding an individual computer, you can choose another option if required.

VAW_2.1_8

Win7Demo computer present. You can lookup fully qualified machine names or add an IP address by clicking add.

VAW_2.1_9

Specify discovery intervals and specify whether or not to upgrade agent if it needs to.

Note that distribution server can be set to something geographically close to the computer in the protection group.

VAW_2.1_10

Review the deployment.

VAW_2.1_11

Config applied.

VAW_2.1_12

Finished. I opted to run a discover now.

The scan box should pop up and hopefully update the agent on the machine. The machines do require a reboot following upgrade. This can be performed as part of the upgrade or just wait until the machine has been rebooted.

Note, I did have some issues with this step initially with Veeam being unable to connect to the endpoint. I will cover the fix in a separate blog post.

Following the reboot of the agent, we can now see that it is present in the Demo Protection Group and some more info is displayed such as status, OS, IP address etc.

VAW_2.1_21

Now I mentioned that the task tray icon would disappear from the endpoint following the upgrade. You are unable to launch the application, if it is being managed by VBR server.

VAW_2.1_22

 

VAW Backup Job Creation.

Once the protection group has been created, a backup job for the agents needs to be defined, otherwise they will not do anything. Any previous job config that was defined locally on the agent is removed once the agent is managed by VBR.

Create a new backup job. Choose agents.

VAW_2.1_23

Choose the type of agent job to define. Note there is no Free mode here.

VAW_2.1_24

Add a protection group or computer to the job.

VAW_2.1_25

Choose the protection group created earlier.

VAW_2.1_26

Choose what level of backup is required. Entire Computer and Volume are block based backup, File level is just that.

VAW_2.1_27

Choose where to backup to.

VAW_2.1_28

Type in the details of the server the backups are going to be sent to. This option here suggests to me that agent management can be handled by one VBR server whilst backups could be sent to another VBR server. Why you would do this when geographically dispersed repositories can be handled by the same VBR server is achievable, I don’t know?

VAW_2.1_29

Select an available repository.

VAW_2.1_30

Set the backup schedule.

VAW_2.1_31

and done. Now I said this would not work with the free edition of Veeam agent. You will receive the following error.

VAW_2.1_32

 

Changing License Type.

Lets assume you have come this far and actually, you have purchased some licenses for the Veeam agents. This is how to apply a license to an agent running in free mode.

VAW_2.1_35

Click the Agent for Windows tab and then assign a license to the endpoint.

VAW_2.1_33

You may need to temporarily remove the endpoint from the agent backup job to be able to change the license type.

And that’s it. Manage the agents, create backup jobs, jobs a goodun.

 

Ian

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2 Responses

  1. 22nd December 2017

    […] have previously written a blog post about Veeam Agent for Windows management with Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 U3. In that post, I mentioned the agent upgrade process was […]

  2. 22nd December 2017

    […] Managing Veeam Agent for Window with Veeam 9.5 U3  […]

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