PB WITH OFFHOST BACKUP PROXY + AGENTLESS QUESTION

[abigot@serians.fr]

hi.

Veeam is agentless, isnt'it ? so why does it install 3 services on Hyper-V hosts when adding them to Veeam ?
is it possible to keep agentless feature when backing up in Offhost mode ?
My customer want to test Veeam in his production Hyper-V cluster (protect by backupexec agents for the moment), but don't want to install Veeam services on cluster hosts to avoid backup agent conflict for instance.
So can someone explain me what "agentless" means in HYper-V environments ? (ok in VSphere, all its ok and Veeam is a nice&efficient product !)

I've installed Veeam (not in a vm) on a Hyper-V to use the later as a Offhost Backup Proxy Hyper-V, but, when backing up a VM on another Hyper-V with forced Offhost backup proxy, I get this error: ...no offhost hyper-v backup proxies are available ...
(in On-host backup : no problem)

any documentation will be appreciated (other than veeam_backup_6_userguide_hyper-V.pdf).

Thanks

[abigot@serians.fr]

Hi,
I've the same trouble with Veeam installed on a server which doesn't have Hyper-V role.
:
no offhost hyper-v backup proxies are available whenever I try and force Offhost Backup Proxy mode.
All my servers are US Windows 2008 R2 SP1 & fresh install. Firewall are off. UAC is off. Onhost backup are ok.
Does Patch3 will correct this problem ?
Do I miss something ?

Thank you.
regards,

[foggy]

Arnaud, have you added the off-host proxy to the Veeam B&R console (using the Backup Infrastructure > Backup Proxies > Add Hyper-V Offhost Backup Proxy command)?

As for the agentless mode, there are actually no agents for you to license or deploy, manage, monitor or update on hosts or VMs and it is absolutely the same as it is for vSphere part. VBR is agentless in terms of installing agents into the guest VMs but, obviously, the proxy server needs some transport components (services) to be installed on it to be able to read and transfer the data from the Hyper-V host.

[abigot@serians.fr]

Hi,
I called Veeam Support : they told me I can't use Offhost backup proxy server if I use Software VSS. it's a Veeam limitation. (cf Veeam on Hyper-V userguide : Page 17 ‘choosing vss provider’.)

VBR is not really agentless with Hyper-v hosts : as Hyper-V does not have Change Block Tracking feature, Veeam comes with its own Change Block Tracking technology,... it seems to rely on some services which reside on the Hyper-V hosts....

[Gostev]

It's not really a "Veeam limitation", but VSS design. Offhost backup requires shared storage and hardware VSS provider implementing "transportable" VSS shadow copies. If there is no shared storage, or no such hardware VSS provider, then it is simply impossible to mount VSS snapshot made on one server to another server (offhost proxy in this case).

As far as agentless, reading back through Alexander's reply above, by agentless we mean agents inside the protected VMs (which is what all typical "legacy" backup software requires). As far as host components, of course these are present. For example, VMware CBT (changed block tracking) code also runs on the host itself.