Windows 11 22H2 not officially supported by Veeam

[GabesVirtualWorld]

Not forgetting about the small SMB, I started there. Had the same issues, but was also able to change things around by explaining management what the impact was of just buying anything and have me support it. We agreed on having the co-workers buying from a specified list of selected workstations and created a basic image that was installed on every new system.

[albertwt]

Microsoft, for better or worse, has moved to a much more frequent update cycle. Many software vendors now follow this model. As for rock stability, we use M365 backup so I might disagree with that sentiment. Simply not very agile.

Rob,
What is M365 backup ?, which vendor

[Regnor]

It would be interesting to know which OEM is that quick and already delivers 22H2 on their devices?
And even if there's one delivering it, wouldn't the first step be to re-image it?

[soncscy]

ITP-Stan, I don't think anyone's forgotten about the small business market, but the "S" in "SMB" is same as a scarlet A; you need to accept that it carries a stigma that will always be considered when it comes to resource allocation.

This isn't to shame any SMB for being an SMB, but it's really important to understand that development resources aren't free; this costs a ton for any moderately sized business, and for an Enterprise, it must be huge. It's not that the SMB is forgotten, it's that the entire industry is the victim of forcing systems that are inadequately supported to market.

I know this doesn't make it better for you or anyone else, and I'm not trying to convince you that this is a good thing, but instead to try to understand that as painful as it is to be in this position, it's painful for everyone.

The IT-sphere is not in a healthy spot, and the pain felt by such situations isn't unique to SMBs, it's felt across the entire landscape. It sucks, but I would advise understand that the answer isn't to push the suck elsewhere, but to pushback on the people producing the suck.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Rob,
What is M365 backup ?, which vendor

Veeam.

[robnicholsonmalt]

I'm getting the same message but backups are running.

The only issue I've found so far is that recovery media produced from a W11 machine doesn't work. Black screen part way through. Reported by others.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Wow, wish I could afford such a statement.... Waiting to upgrade to vCenter and ESXi 8 in our datacenter. But before we can we have to wait for:

[snipped]

Support & release schedules for back-office systems are very different to endpoints. Main difference is that they are entirely in the control of the IT department. Endpoints are a very different kettle of fish and conventional wisdom these days is that it's better to keep up to date with new releases. The time of three-year big bang upgrades is long gone. Driven initially I believe by Apple and then adopted by Microsoft. It's just more agile and appears to work better in the long run.

[zimeon]

Veeam could have a more open beta program, wouldn't mind having a go on the beta stuff now that we're supposedly quite close to RTM releases.

[Nils]

new machines are coming off of the shelves with 22H2 already installed..

Funny thing - I'd have thought that any serious business reinstalls clients with their own image first thing...

We require 6-8 months for integrating and testing a new Win 10 release before dumping it on our users, so I find Veeam's 90 days very reasonable.

[mweissen13]

People seem to forget about the SMB market, where the small companies just buy a computer and use the OS that is pre-installed by the factory.
You know, those companies that are small and do not have their own IT department.

Server OS and hypervisor, that's a different story. No way I'm jumping to ESXi v8 already.

We also have many SMB customers maybe 2-3 employees "in the field" which are using Veeam to do local & cloud backup. And you can't always prevent everybody from clicking "update now". Especially when Veeam Agent is the only thing which we installed there. Then it suddendly breaks and the customer calls us and yells at us why. Usually we tell them that next time they should rather not be the first ones to update. But you know, users sometime even don't realize what they did. Since we are not managing their clients and there is no IT staff that does, it's not the best situation.

On the other hand, to these customers a 100% reliable backup is like life insurance. You never know when they will click some funny link that encrypts all the data.

[dbewernick]

@ian.watts @ITP-Stan Please be aware of the following:
Microsoft, VMware, and a lot of other vendors we work with in a partnership, communicate about their release cycles with our RnD teams. When there is a pre-release/beta version of a partner solution, we start do some initial testing to see if there are incompatibilities to discover.

As we have seen multiple times in the past, some designs and features even change between the release of a RTM version until a GA version a few weeks later. That is why the only way to give support on a new version of a partner product, is to start the full QA testing with the final GA version. Every full test cycle does need a huge effort, because our product needs to integrate deep into OS systems and software to deliver our valuable options to protect and recover data.
If bugs are found during this process, we need to implement fixes. These leads to multiple additional test cycles to make sure the fixes do not impact other parts of the products or compatibility with older versions of partner solutions.

In the scenario of a new Windows version, we also need to test and change things for various parts of our products. Do Enterprise Manager, Agents, Veeam Backup & Replication Server, Data Mover services, Storage Integration and more will also work on this new version?

As you can see, it is not only testing a new version of Windows for an Agent. It is always a testing for multiple features, product parts, other related vendor systems and got nothing to do with Enterprise or SMB customer priority.

[gnalley]

Don’t understand the SMB market statement. Proper inventory, change control and system management is proper inventory, change control and system management. The only difference is scale. Proper IT is proper IT just like proper accounting is proper accounting.

[Gostev]

All of that is rare in SMB simply because most businesses simply can't afford it.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Funny thing - I'd have thought that any serious business reinstalls clients with their own image first thing...

There are millions of small businesses who don't have an IT department at all. I think they would disagree that they aren't serious businesses.

[ITP-Stan]

Don't get me wrong.
I think the 90-day support period is quite okay. Specially for server and Hypervisor OS that's quick!
I just read the comments here and I can see a huge disconnect between the IT staff of large businesses and the consultant that supports SMB businesses.

Anyways, I have been using Veeam professionally for more than 10 years and saw it grow from a product for SMB (remember FastSCP) to the full range of products they have now.

[vmtech123]

Whether they are the market leader because of their rock solid reliability and solid releases is not relevant when the issue at hand is to keep current with the currently released operating systems. Microsoft is quite communicative about the release schedules, and previews have always been available for months ahead of those releases.

It comes down to a simple argument I have with my vendors like Veeam. Keep up or we'll find somebody else who does. We can all argue reasons in favor of not being "the first" to upgrade or update.. but the fact remains that new machines are coming off of the shelves with 22H2 already installed.. Veeam needs to keep up if they want to remain competitive in this market.

Keep up or I'll find someone that rushes their products into production. lol.

No one is forcing you to update the second it comes out. VMware often don't predict the future either and have support for OS's before they are avialable.

90 days is totally fine. Things should sit in test for a while anyways before they get rolled out into production. I'm guessing you work at a smaller company or someone would be on the hook for either not checking compatibility, or allowing an update that soon without doing proper testing.

There's a reason I don't have vSphere 8 in PROD, and why i'll do a SIGNIFICANT amount of testing with Veeam V12.

Jeez, I think of how many people have been begging for legacy support on non supported OS's around here lately. and now the opposite asking Veeam to rush support out threatening to leave. The same people will start to complain when it becomes large, bloated, buggy, and expensive due to the rushing and legacy testing/support needed.

Veeam is the best backup solution out there, are very transparent about their time lines and what they do and don't support. I'm not going to go yell at HP for the GEN9's i have not being able to support Version 8 VMware. I'm going to upgrade my hosts to something newer. Just relax and it will be supported soon enough.

The funny thing is, is that I bet it works nearly 100% even with the warning.

[robnicholsonmalt]

>90 days is totally fine

That's up next Tuesday for the Windows 11 22H2 release so look forward to an update.

[4reverse4]

It's now been three months since the release of 22H2.

Lots of machines have automatically updated by now... still no solution from Veeam?

What gives?

[Nils]

@4reverse4 W10 22H2 was released on 18 October. 90 days are over on 16 January 2023.

[Gostev]

Guys, keep in mind 90 days is a target, as opposed to some magic point in time where things are guaranteed to happen. Depending on the next release vehicle timing, support will often come much quicker than 90 days, and other times it will take longer than 90 days. As I have already explained earlier, no feature can just be shipped by itself on some random date (such as the 90th day from some platform release). Instead, all pending features require a release vehicle where they are consolidated. Our immediate release vehicle is V12, so now we just need to wait When It's Ready™ to be shipped.

Lots of machines have automatically updated by now... still no solution from Veeam?

Actually, the solution does exist since the beginning of this thread: you can backup and restore Windows 11 22H2 normally and it is fully supported by Veeam. The only caveat is that the Veeam Recovery Media for bare-metal recoveries must be created on a non-Windows 11 22H2 computer. For example, everyone who still does not have it can just create it prior to upgrading to 22H2.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Whilst there is a workaround, I would hope there is enough "concern" raised here to review the release cycle specifically around Windows support. No problem with back office components but client operating systems are different. Consider the scenario where Microsoft discovered such a critical security problem that they had to release a breaking change. Would it still be 90 days?

[Andreas Neufert]

Patches for critical bugs and security vulnerabilities are developed by Microsoft for all supported operating systems (not only for the latest). Veeam supports them automatically from Day 1 for all platforms (not just Windows) because they are typically point bug fixes which rarely break anything.

When there is a new Windows Version that changes functionality (not only patches functionality) we need to do a full QA cycle against it. We have more than 400 000 customers that run Windows + Veeam in all kind of combinations (Veeam components, Veeam Server, Clients, Databases, Application Servers,...) and we want to make sure that the user experience for this large amount of customers is excellent (this includes support reaction time, so we can not afford to support something without fully QA testing). As Anton shared this is in the interest of our customers.

[robnicholsonmalt]

So no, you're not going to support major Windows updates from day 1. As long as we understand that.

[Gostev]

That is correct. According to our policy, claiming support for any "major update" of any platform requires a full regression testing cycle of the GA code of said major update to be performed, during which we re-validate potentially impacted product features and functionality against the new platform version, and perform long-term stability tests to ensure the new platform code does not have leaks or bugs which can eventually result in data corruption/loss scenarios, continuous job failures etc. These two activities take at least a couple of weeks so that's the absolute minimum delay possible before we can officially claim support for any major update (and be able to honestly tell our customers that it's OK to deploy them). Not doing such testing internally means having our customers do this same testing in their production environments instead.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Whilst I can appreciate your internal processes (I've worked in software development) I would still argue you are wrong in the specific instance of Windows support. Windows has the insider program for this very reason. They long since abandoned the idea of major updates and adopted the Apple more evolutionary release process. One might say a more agile approach. It was clear that the one-every-three year release schedule for Windows and Office caused more problems than it fixed.

What I don't understand is that there appears to be one reported problem (on here) after 22H2 has been on public release for two months and that's generating the recovery media. Why not fix that one problem in a patch? The core product can clearly backup Windows 11 22H2 because it's not really a major update.

I'm sorry if I sound horrible but when I've been asked to comment on Veeam, stability and lack of bugs hasn't scored too high but my experience is specifically in the M365 backup space which is a difficult often moving target. But you seem to regularly release fixes for that platform (based on how regular the VEX clients are updated) but not Windows which IMO is a much more stable environment.

[Andreas Neufert]

From a security patching perspective related to Microsoft releases. Microsoft creates patches for all their supported platforms and do not force customers to use these major updates for it.

Anton commented above on the early release process. We are on it and of cause develop changes within that program. But Microsoft as well is collecting feedback during that time and address bugs or functionality until the release. So we need a full QA cycle after the release which is by design multiple weeks. When nothing is broken we just declare support for it. If we need to change anything we use the next available release vehicle to integrate this into. As Anton shared we support so many platforms and there is no good way to release so many updates all the time on a near daily base, so it has to go into the next Update/Version.

For M365 it is "just" the API in a very defined and hardened infrastructure that you need to support. It is much simpler to work with a pointed backup product.

For Windows there is a whole ecosystem of hardware and different configuration (ReFS version, with and without hardening, with and without usual group policies, different Antivirus vendors, different storage drivers, VSS writers from various applications, VSS requestors from other software, different authentication methods, our ports in use by new 3rd party software,.... you name it) and we are learning from our support experience on what we need to test and could break. So it is not that simple compared with M365 and we do it reliably as we want to have the best user experience and reliable backups.

[robnicholsonmalt]

You're talking more there about Windows server than Windows desktop? Nobody is seriously running ReFS on their laptop and if they are, you're holding back for the minority. I support Windows desktop and server so appreciate the complexity. 22H2 was released to the preview channel in June 2022 - six months ago. Server backup and client backup are two totally different scenarios. The former does need a more reserved approach but not client.

[Gostev]

We don't see desktop Windows as a workload where we can or should sacrifice reliability. We also don't see server backup and client backup as "two totally different scenarios" and we don't treat them any differently in terms of acceptable quality threshold. I understand that in your opinion it should be done differently, and perhaps there are other backup companies who indeed treat desktop Windows less seriously, but we don't operate like that.

[Gostev]

All, please do pay close attention to the fact that this thread is about Windows 11 22H2.
Some recent posts about Windows 10 22H2 have been moved into the existing dedicated topic.

[RubinCompServ]

They long since abandoned the idea of major updates

And yet...Windows 11 is a "thing", despite promises that there would be no new versions beyond Windows 10.