READ THIS FIRST : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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Navigation

General FAQ
This topic (scroll down) covers general information about the product, and all core features which are not hypervisor-specific.

VMware vSphere FAQ
The following FAQ covers VMware vSphere specific questions:
VMware : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Microsoft Hyper-V FAQ
The following FAQ covers Microsoft Hyper-V specific questions.
Hyper-V : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (to be posted later)

Recorded Demo
These recorded v6 webinars are highly recommended for both new and existing Veeam Backup & Replication users:
http://go.veeam.com/webinar-series-doug ... on-ty.html

If you are still on v5, use this FAQ instead.

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Table of Content

General
Licensing
Upgrade
System Requirements

Basic concepts
Job types
Backup
Deduplication
Application-Aware Image Processing

Architecture
Overview
Backup Proxies
Backup Repositories
Bottleneck Analysis

File Level Recovery
Instant File Level Recovery
1-Click File Restore
Guest File System Indexing and Search

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Licensing

General

Q: How the product is licensed?
A: Per physical CPU socket of "source" hypervisor host (where protected virtual machines reside). Destination hosts (for replication, and migration jobs) do not need to be licensed. Hosts running virtual machines which are not being processed by Veeam do not need to be licensed, even if they are a part of the same cluster.

Q: When do the host sockets get counted towards the licensed sockets pool?
A: Upon first backup, replication or copy of a VM that is running on the given host.

Q: Are any of the product components (enterprise manage, backup servers, proxy servers, repositories, AIR wizards etc.) licensed separately?
A: No, they are not licensed separately. You can deploy as many of those components as it makes sense for your environment.

Q: How licensed sockets for each hypervisor are tracked, is it the same pool?
A: No, each hypervisor has its own socket count in the license file.

Q: Is the socket price different depending on hypervisor?
A: No, the price is the same no matter of hypervisor.

Q: Can I change my licensed sockets from one hypervisor to another?
A: Yes, you can do it at any time by contacting your Veeam sales representative. Conversion is available free of charge. As a part of the process, you will also be provided with a temporary license key giving you the licensed amount of sockets for both hypervisors to allow coexistence of environments on the same backup server. This license key is provided at no charge, is good 3 months, and can be extended upon request (for large socket count environments only). Technical support for both hypervisors is also included at no charge for the duration of the temporary license.

Q: Can I install multiple v6 backup servers across multiple sites using the same license file?
A: You can install any number of backup servers using the same license file, as long as the actual socket usage across all backup servers does not exceed the licensed amount. To ensure compliance, we recommend that you use Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager, which provides centralized license management. Enterprise Manager reports actual socket usage across all backup servers, and can be used to apply the new v6 license file to all connected backup servers.

Q: I have removed some hosts from my environment, can I get their sockets back into the license pool?
A: Yes. Just select the host, and click Revoke in the license management dialog.

Upgrade

Q: I am an existing customer running v5. Do I need new license file to install v6?
A: Yes, you need to obtain new license file for version 6.x. Your existing license file for any previous versions will not work.

Q: Do I need new license file to upgrade from 6.0 or 6.1 to 6.5?
A: No. Your existing license file (6.x) will work with any v6 release.

Q: Is v6 a free upgrade from previous versions?
A: With VEEAM, all upgrades are "free" for customers on maintenance. All new license purchases include 1 year of maintenance. If you bought Veeam Backup more than 1 year ago, but did not extend your maintenance after the 1st year, you need to address this with your Veeam sales representative first by purchasing maintenance, including the "blank" period coverage.

Q: I am current customer on maintenance, how do I get the license file for v6?
A: Please use License Management Portal in the product download area to get your new license file, or email licensing@veeam.com for assistance. If you choose to email, expect delayed response in the first few days after the product release.

Q: Which v6 product edition do I get upgraded to when upgrading from v5?
A: Same product edition as you are currently using with v5 (Standard or Enterprise).

Q: What are the feature differences between the Standard and Enterprise editions? Are there any new differences comparing to v5?
A: Yes, some newly added v6 features are only available in the Enterprise edition. Please see the updated Standard vs. Enterprise Edition comparison document on product page under Resources tab.

For technical upgrade related questions, please refer to the VMware-specific FAQ topic.

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System Requirements

Q: What are the system requirements and supported configurations for the product components, and for protected VMs?
A: For detailed list, see System Requirements section of the Release Notes document that comes with your download, and also available on product page under Resources tab. Refer to platform-specific FAQ topics for additional information.

Q: Is Veeam Backup & Replication supported running in a VM?
A: Yes.

Q: What are the benefits of using the 64-bit version of Veeam Backup & Replication over 32-bit version?
A: Using 64-bit version does not provide any significant benefits.

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Job Types

Q: What are Backup jobs designed for?
A: Backup jobs produce highly compressed and deduplicated backup files with production VMs data, which allows you to save significant amount of space required to host the backups. Full VM restore from backup usually takes significant time due to the need to extract and copy full VM image from backup to the production storage.

Q: What are Replication jobs designed for?
A: Replication jobs produce exact replicas of production VMs on standby hosts. These replicas can be powered on immediately when production VM goes down, without any dependencies on Veeam Backup and Replication server and at full I/O performance. However, replicas require standby host, and much more disk space due to being uncompressed. Thus, replica are typically are only used for tier 1 VMs with low recovery time objectives.

Q: What are Migration jobs designed for?
A: Migration jobs can move the running VMs to the selected hosts and storage with minimum possible downtime. Depending on your migration scenario and VMware licensing level, the migration job will automatically leverage one of the following: VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, Veeam Quick Migration with SmartSwitch, or Veeam Quick Migration with cold switch. This allows you to quickly evacuate VMs from hosts requiring urgent maintenance without affecting bandwidth or performance, or perform inter- and intra- datacenter migrations. Migration jobs are only supported for VMware VMs.

Q: What are VM Copy jobs designed for?
A: VM Copy jobs produce exact copies of selected VMs on the selected storage, and can be used for scenarios such as datacenter migrations, creating test labs, and ad-hoc backups. VM Copy jobs support processing of running VMs. Unlike backup job however, VM Copy does not support "incremental" runs. VM copy jobs are only supported for VMware VMs.

Q: What are File Copy jobs designed for?
A: File Copy jobs are designed to copy regular files (such as ISO, VMDK or VHD) to and from hosts or any other storage, and can be used for various administrative tasks. File Copy jobs do not support processing of virtual disk files belonging to running VMs.

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Backup

Synthetic Backup

Q: What are the benefits of synthetic full backup that you provide?
A: A few times less stress on the production environment, a few times faster full backup performance, a few time less backup storage space due to no need to keep multiple fulls (available in certain backup modes only).

Q: We have a policy in place that requires me to do real full backups. Am I forced to use synthetic fulls with Veeam?
A: No, you can configure the job to perform active (real) full backups instead. Also, you can schedule active full backup, for example, once a month (or once a quarter), while doing synthetic full backup for the rest of the time. v5 provides great flexibility around scheduling active full backups.

Q: How exactly does reversed incremental backup mode work?
A: Refer to the following post: Veeam Synthetic Backup Explained

Q: How the transform option for regular incremental backup is different from what reversed incremental backup mode does?
A: Essentially, the end result of transformation is the same - single full backup containing the most recent VM state, with earlier restore points (VRB files) "going back" from that state. The difference is that with reversed incremental backup mode, this happens every time you run the backup. With incremental backup mode, this happens on synthetic full backup day only. This speeds up backup on incremental days, but slows them down on full backup days.

Tape & Offsite

Q: Does Veeam support writing backups directly to tape?
A: No, we support backup to disk only at this time. Customers who have requirement to store backup files on tape choose to use post-job script (see advanced job settings) to trigger their legacy tape backup solution to copy backup files created by Veeam to tape. Search this forum for "tape" for more info.

Q: How can I make it so that only the latest backup file is copied over to another storage or tape?
A: You can use this PowerShell script, or leverage capabilities of your tape backup solution (example for BackupExec).

Q: What is the best way to perform offsite backups with v6?
A: v6 is optimized to off-site backups out of box, so you can simply backup directly to offsite backup repository. If you prefer to backup locally, we recommend using rsync to sync backup files offsite. Search this forum for offsite and rsync for more information from customers employing this technique.

Backup Modes

Q: What backup mode should I choose among available?
A: This depends on your requirements. Please review the Excel document attached to this post for pros and cons of each backup mode (considerations did not change comparing to v5).

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Deduplication

Q: What kind of deduplication do you perform?
A: We perform agentless, block-level, inline (on-the-fly) deduplication. Deduplication happens both at source (before data is sent to backup storage, which significantly improves backup performance), as well as target (to achieve additional reduction for jobs with multiple VMs). Veeam was the first vendor on the VM backup market to add inline deduplication for image-level backups in version 1.0 released in February 2008.

Q: How efficient your deduplication is?
A: Compression and deduplication ratios up to 10x and more of the original size can be achieved, but this depends on too many factors, such as amount of VMs in the job, similarity of those VMs, content of virtual disks, etc.

Q: 10x is nice from software, but other software and hardware dedupe vendors claim to have 100x and more deduplication ratio?
A: Ask them to provide the formula they are using to calculate dedupe ratio. With Veeam, 10x is pure deduplication ratio within a single full backup file (bytes in divided by bytes out). Other vendors often inflate ratios to achieve impressive numbers for marketing purposes. This is typically done by assuming each backup is full. If you apply this approach to Veeam, then with most typical 30 days retention policy with daily backups, you will get up to 300x "marketing" dedupe ratio. This is because Veeam synthethic backup allows you to keep only one full backup on disk at any time (no matter of how long your retention policy is).

Q: To what level the deduplication is done?
A: We do block level dedupe with constant block size (configurable 1024 KB, 512 KB or 256 KB blocks), on the job level (not between jobs).

Q: How can I achieve the best deduplication ratio?
A: Group similar VMs (such as VMs with the same operating system, or VMs made from the same template) in the same job. Have fewer jobs with more VMs in each, rather more jobs with fewer VMs in each.

Q: My VMs are not made from the same template. Will dedupe work between them?
A: Yes. Because deduplication is done on block level, it does not matter if VMs were made from the same template, or provisioned manually. Any similar blocks between VMs will be deduped, even if these VMs have different operating systems.

Q: Does deduplication work for replication, or for backup only?
A: No, because replicas are created in native format (uncompressed), deduplication is not applicable to them.

Q: Since Veeam has its own deduplication, does it make any sense to write Veeam backup files to storage device with hardware deduplication?
A: Yes, this way you will get global deduplication (between backup files produced by different backup jobs). Generally speaking, deduplicating storage devices are best choice for long-term archival of backup files produced by Veeam. However, not every deduplicating storage device is good as primary backup target, because unlike raw disks, these devices are not designed to provide good IOPS, and may become primary bottleneck for your backup performance, thus affecting your backup window. Likewise, poor random read I/O performance certain deduplicating storage devices are exhibiting may affect restore performance.

Q: Have you done integration testing with other vendor's deduplicating technology such as EMC DataDomain, HP StoreOnce, ExaGrid, etc?
A: Yes, we have partnerships with most deduplicating storage vendors. Moreover, v6 delivers noticeable integration improvements based on the tests we have conducted.

Q: Should I disable built-in deduplication it I am backing up to a deduplicating appliance?
A: No, we recommend that you keep it enabled for better results! You will get faster backups, and more portable backup files. However, consider disabling compression, because compression may affect deduplicating ratio significantly on these type of storage devices.

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Application-Aware Image Processing

Q: What exactly do you mean by application-aware image processing?
A: Application-aware image processing is unique Veeam technology that allows creating image-level backups in application-aware manner. It is a multi-step process that consists of detecting applications running inside of the processed VM; using Microsoft VSS to perform application-level quiescence to ensure that each application state is transactionally consistent; applying application-specific settings to prepare each application to perform VSS-aware restore on the next VM startup; and finally performing transaction logs pruning for certain applications if backup was successful. The whole process is fully automated.

Q: Why application aware image processing functionality in Veeam is important? How is it better than VMware Tools VSS integration?
A: Microsoft VSS was not designed with image-level backup and restores in mind, but rather for file-level backup and restore process. For some applications, on top of basic VSS quiescence, additional steps need to be taken when backing up and restoring the VM image as a whole.

Q: Do I need to deploy persistent agent in every VM that I am backing up in order to be able to use application-aware image processing?
A: No, Veeam does not use persistent agents inside VMs. Instead, Veeam automatically deploys small runtime coordination process to each VM when backup starts, and removes it immediately after backup finishes. This frees you up from agents micromanagement (deployment, configuration, updates, monitoring, troubleshooting). Besides, actual VM runs without any 3rd party agents present most of the time.

Q: Does Veeam install its own VSS provider on each guest?
A: No, we leverage default VSS provider from Microsoft that is already available on each Windows guest.

Q: What is Microsoft VSS and how it can provide transaction consistency with image-level backups?
A: Please read the following beginners guide to Microsoft VSS: What is Windows VSS & why you should care

Q: What applications do you support for transaction-consistent backups?
A: Any VSS-aware application running on Windows XP/2003 or later. All modern server applications from Microsoft are VSS-aware, plus many 3rd party vendors ship their server application with VSS writers as well.

Q: How do I know if my application is VSS-aware?
A: It should implement VSS writer and have it installed and registered in Microsoft VSS framework. Open command prompt on backed up VM, and run vssadmin list writers for complete list of VSS-aware applications on specific system.

Q: Do you know if Oracle has VSS writer?
A: Yes, Oracle 11g has a component named "Oracle VSS Writer" that installs when selecting Windows OCI Components on the Oracle 11g database install wizard. It does support Oracle 10g starting from patchset 10.2.0.3

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Architecture

Backup

Q: What is the data flow in case of backup?
A: Disk > Backup proxy > Network > Backup repository > Disk

Q: How do I make my backups LAN-free?
A: Put both backup proxy and backup repository on the same server.

Replication

Q: What is the data flow in case of replication?
A: Disk > Source proxy > Network > Target proxy > Disk

Q: Can I use the same source and target proxy for replication?
A: Yes, but only when replicating locally (on-site replication).

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Backup Proxies

Q: What is the backup proxy server?
A: Backup proxy fetches the VM data (configuration files and virtual disks) from the production storage, processes the data to reduce it size by applying deduplication and compression, and sends it off to the backup repository (in case of backup) or another backup proxy server (in case of replication). Backup proxy is also used to write the VM data (configuration files and virtual disks) back to the production storage which is used for VM restores, and to create and update replica VMs for replication.

Q: When is it best to install the proxy server on a physical machine?
A: Because on-the-fly processing (deduplication and compression) of heavy data streams (hunreds of MB per second) requires significant CPU, Memory and I/O resources, physical proxy server suits best for 24/7 virtual environments with high consolidation ratio. Otherwise, you may find backup process affecting your production.

Q: What OS can I install the proxy server on?
A: Microsoft Windows XP or later. This can be new or existing server.

Q: Do I have to setup a proxy server to start using a product?
A: No, as default proxy server is deployed by the setup automatically. However, we recommend that you add additional ones for redundancy and load-balancing. For recommendations on where it is best to deploy additional proxies, please refer to the hypervisor-specific FAQ.

Q: Can the proxy server backup itself?
A: Yes, the proxy server can backup itself and any other Veeam Backup & Replication component.

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Backup Repositories

Q: What is the backup repository?
A: Backup repository is the place where your backups are stored. Each backup repository has local agent that enables for efficient local processing of incremental data in cases when backup proxy and backup repository communicate over LAN or WAN.

Q: What do you support as a backup repository?
A: The following repositories are supported:
• Any storage directly attached to a Microsoft Windows server (Windows XP or later, both x86 and x64 supported). The storage can be local disks, directly attached disk based storage (such as USB hard drive), or a iSCSI/FC SAN LUN in case the server is connected into the SAN fabric.
• Any storage directly attached to, or mounted on a Linux server (x86 and x64 of all major distributions are supported, must have SSH and Perl installed). The storage can be local disks, directly attached disk based storage (such as USB hard drive), NFS share, or iSCSI/FC SAN LUN in case the server is connected into the SAN fabric.
• CIFS (SMB) share. Password authentication is supported. Data can be written to CIFS share directly from the backup proxy server, or through secondary backup proxy server (useful in cases when CIFS share is located in the remote site).

Q: Can I use a virtual machine as my backup repository?
A: Yes, however be sure to think you recover plan in case of disaster carefully. While actual VM does not need to be running in order for you to be able to restore (as you can always import your backups directly from storage), remember that disaster may affect your ability to retrieve the backup files if you store them in the VM disks located on your production storage. Additional recommendations and considerations are provided in the hypervisor-specific FAQ.

Q: What RAID level do you recommend for the underlying backup storage?
A: We recommend at least RAID5 for minimal redundancy. However, our customers are recommending RAID10 whenever possible, because this helps with performance of I/O intensive backup operations (such as synthetic fulls).

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Bottleneck Analysis

Q: Job statistics tells me I have a bottleneck, and I cannot seem to get rid of this no matter what I do. What am I doing wrong?
A: You are doing nothing wrong. Even most powerful backup infrastructure will have a bottleneck - just like any bottle, no matter of size, has a bottleneck. We merely show you the "weakest" link - what to consider upgrading next to be able to improve processing performance. However, if you are happy with you jobs performance and backup window, you should not do anything about it (just consider this info as an FYI).

Q: What do the 4 load numbers I get in per-VM statistics mean?
A: These numbers show percent of time the given data processing stage was busy versus waiting for other stages to provide or accept the data. Do not expect the numbers across all processing stages to add up to 100%, as busy time of each processing stage is measured separately and independently.

Q: What are the data processing stages?
A: No matter what job you are running, and how you have the product deployed, there are 4 main data processing stages that data passes in the specific order (think data processing conveyor). These are Source > Proxy > Network > Target, and each processing stage has a load monitoring counter associated with it.

"Source" is the source (production) storage disk reader component. The percent busy number for this component indicates percent of time that the source disk reader spent reading the data from the storage. For example, 99% busy means that the disk reader spent all of the time reading the data, because the following stages are always ready to accept more data for processing. This means that the source data retrieval speed is a bottleneck for the whole data processing conveyor. As opposed to that, 1% busy means that the source disk reader only spent 1% of time actually reading the data (and required data blocks were retrieved very fast), and did nothing the rest of the time, just waiting for the following stages to be able to accept more data for processing (which means that the bottleneck is elsewhere in the data processing conveyor).

"Proxy" is the backup proxy server (source backup proxy in case of replication). Proxy performs on-the-fly deduplication and compression of data received from the source component, which can be quite resource intensive operation on 100MB/s plus data streams. The percent busy number for proxy component shows the proxy CPU load. For example, if proxy shows 99% busy, it means that the proxy CPU is overloaded, and is likely presenting a bottleneck on the whole data processing conveyor.

"Network" is the network queue writer component (with network being Ethernet, or storage network). It gets processed data from the proxy component, and sends it over the network to the target component. The percent busy number for network component shows percent of time that network writer component was busy writing the data into the network stack queue. For example, 99% busy means that the network writer component spends most of the time pushing the data into the network, because there is always some data waiting to be sent over to the target. This means that your network throughtput is insufficient, and is presenting a bottleneck on the whole data processing conveyor.

"Target" is the target (backup/replica storage) disk writer component . The percent busy number for target component shows percent of time that the target disk writer component spent writing the data to the storage. For example, if target shows 99% busy, it means that the target disk writer component spent most of its time performing I/O to backup files. This means your target storage speed is presenting a bottleneck for the whole data processing conveyor, because all the required I/O operations cannot complete fast enough, and due to that there is always some data to write waiting in the incoming queue from the network component.

Q: Can I see load numbers in the real-time?
A: If you hover over the bottleneck value in the real-time statistics window, you will get a tooltip with the current values. However, because this data is real-time, it may be affected by intermittent issues, or temporary conditions (such as system cache population in the beginning of the job). Averaged load data logged in the session log for each VM is more accurate and reliable.

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Instant File Level Recovery

Windows

Q: Does instant file level recovery (FLR) require that backup file content is extracted and staged on disk or in RAM before recovery can take place?
A: No, file-level recovery happens directly from backup file, withour prior extraction.

Q: Do you have to backup VMs with guest file system indexing enabled in order to enable file level recovery?
A: No - unlike with other solutions, with Veeam indexing is completely optional and is not a requirement for file level recovery.

Q: How does native Windows file level recovery work?
A: Native Windows file level recovery mounts the content of backup file directly to backup server as folders. You can even point any applications to files located in these folders, and use them normally (backup file remains read-only no matter what you do).

Q: Can you restore files with correct permissions?
A: Yes, this option is now available.

Q: What file systems are supported for instant file-level recovery?
A: FAT, NTFS and ReFS.

Q: Are GPT disks supported?
A: Yes, starting version 6.1

Q: Are Windows dynamic disks supported?
A: Yes, starting version 6.5

Other OS

Q: What about other file systems (Linux etc.)?
A: Instant file-level recovery for other file system is currently supported for VMware only. Please refer to VMware-specific FAQ for more information.

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1-Click File Restore (web UI)

Q: I have 1-Click File Restore buttons (Restore and Download) disabled? Guest system indexing is enabled on all jobs.
A: This is premium functionality that is only available in the Enterprise Edition of our product. If you have Standard Edition, use instant file level restore wizards in the B&R console instead.

Q: How does 1-Click File Restore work?
A: Enterprise Manager web UI user picks one or more guest files to restore by browsing or searching guest file system index of the backed up VMs. Enterprise Manager then creates a task on Backup server, and the Backup server restores the file using native file level restore capabilities (explained above).

Q: Do I need to install any agents on the guest to be able to restore files to the original location?
A: No, 1-Click File restore is completely agentless.

Q: Do you have to backup VMs with guest file system indexing enabled in order to enable 1-Click File Restore?
A: Yes, 1-Click file restore requires that guest file system is indexed during the backup.

Q: Does the 1-Click File Restore process preserve the original file, or simply overwrite it?
A: Yes, the original file is preserved with the _original suffix.

Q: What if the original file is locked by some process, and cannot be renamed?
A: In this case, we restore the file with the _restored suffix, and log a warning no notify the restore operator.

Q: How do I make someone the File Restore Operator?
A: Using the Configuration page of the Enterprise Manager, grant user the corresponding role. The user will then be able to logon to the Enterprise Manager web UI. File Restore Operators can only see a subset of web UI (specifically, Files tab only).

Q: Does the File Restore Operator need to have permissions on restored file, guest, VM, or host to be able to perform the in-place restore?
A: No.

Q: Can I restrict File Restore Operators to be able to restore specific files only? Disable ability to download the restore files?
A: Yes, these settings are available in the Enterprise Manager configuration.

Q: In case of in-place restore (back to original location), do you preserve files permissions and ownership?
A: Yes.

Q: What are the system requirements for 1-Click File Restore?
A: Same as for native file level restore (see above), since both are using the same engine.

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Guest File System Indexing and Search

Indexing

Q: Do I need to deploy any agents inside of each VM to be able to index guest file system?
A: No agents are required. All you need to do is select the corresponding check box in the backup job wizard, and specify the administrator's credentials to your VMs.

Q: Will turning on indexing slow down my backups significantly?
A: No. Instead of scanning through the whole file system (like some competitive solution do), we capture index data directly from NTFS MFT, as a part of guest OS freeze process. For a typical VM, the required data is captured and parsed nearly instantly, which is we are calling this Instant Indexing.

Q: Does the indexing functionality require more CPU power on the Veeam Backup server or Veeam Enterprise Manager server?
A: No, creating the “catalog” of all files inside the backed-up image is done by Veeam Backup servers, not by the Enterprise Manager server. Enterprise Manager only displays search results, whereas actual catalog indexing and search is offloaded by Microsoft Search Server (we support both Search Server 2008 and 2010). The Microsoft Search Server Express edition is free and is sufficient for smaller deployments.

Q: Is the Instant Indexing feature only available with Veeam Enterprise Manager?
A: You do not need Enterprise Manager to create the local catalog, but you have to install Enterprise Manager server to be able to browse and search for guest files in VM backups, and maintain global catalog across multiple backup servers. Also, please see the Standard vs. Enterprise Edition comparison document on product page under Resources tab for more information about slight differences in Instant Indexing feature set depending on your Veeam Backup license level.

Q: I have more than one Backup server. Will the guest file search show results across all Backup servers?
A: Yes, as long as all your Backup servers are federated in the Enterprise Manager.

Q: Where does the index database reside?
A: Local catalog is stored directly on the Veeam Backup server, in the location specified during setup. Global catalog (across all backup servers) is located on the Enterprise Manager server. Additionally, index is also stored in the backup file itself (and so it is immediately available for all imported backups).

Q: What do I need to backup to protect index database?
A: You need to backup Enterprise Manager server, since this is what holds global catalog (across all backup servers). Backing up local catalog data on Veeam Backup servers is not required, since any new index data that appears there is automatically (and incrementally) replicated to the global catalog.

Q: It looks like guest file index is missing some files?
A: By default, we do not index Windows system and temp folders to reduce the index size.

Microsoft Search Server Integration

Q: Is Microsoft Search Server required to browse or search guest file system catalog?
A: No, Microsoft Search Server is optional. Browsing functionality does not rely on Microsoft Search Server. Searching for files is also provided natively, however for performance consideration we recommend using Microsoft Search Server in cases when you need to perform searches across more than a few hundreds of indexed VMs.

Q: My guest file system catalog is too large, and a single Microsoft Search Server no longer scales.
A: Just add additional Microsoft Search Server, and Enterprise Manager will automatically load-balance global catalog between them.

Q: Is Microsoft Search Server 2010 better than Microsoft Search Server 2008?
A: Yes, it has a few times better capacity at a cost of increased system requirements. To significantly increase capacity of any version, upgrade to licensed version of Microsoft Search Server, and use licensed Microsoft SQL server for Microsoft Search Server backend database.

Q: Would you suggest putting the Microsoft Search Server on its own server? Is catalog crawl CPU intensive operation?
A: Yes. Catalog crawl is quite resource intensive task that can consume significant chunks of server CPU, thus affecting backup performance.

Q: I have fairly large environment, but want to stick with free Microsoft Search Server Express Edition, do you have any recommendations?
A: Index only those VMs you really need to index (for example, file servers only). Index only selected folders on your VMs (for example, only user home folders on your file servers). If you are still running out of capacity, just deploy additional Microsoft Search Servers.