Unable to complete the action because this backup agent is centrally managed by your system administrator

[daystrom]

After upgrading vbr to 11 from 10 on a windows 2016 server, veeam agent 5.0.3 no longer works.

Now when I try to start agent this message appears and agent doesn't launch:

Unable to complete the action because this backup agent is centrally managed by your system administrator.

I have been using vbr for vm image backups and standalone agent for host backups. I can't be sure that the vbr update made this issue arise.

I've read several post pertaining to this issue. One advice was to change the owner via
Veeam.Agent.Configurator.exe -removeOwner
but that seemed to go nowhere with this result:
Failed to perform the operation.
Unable to set agent to self-managed mode because this backup agent is already managed by the backup server.
I have no idea what that means.
The other recommendation I've seen is to uninstall agent and reinstall. I did that and at the very beginning of the installation I see the original error message:

Unable to complete the action because this backup agent is centrally managed by your system administrator.

What can I do about this?

[Mildur]

Hi Daystrom

veeam agent 5.0.3 no longer works.

What does not work in the managed scenario? Does the backup work?

Managed means, the agent is in a protection group in the Veeam console. You can use the Veeam server to deploy and update the agent. It also allows you to centrally manage the backup jobs.

Could you maybe share why you don't want it to be managed by the Veeam server?

Thanks,
Fabian

[daystrom]

Thanks for the reply Mildur.
My habit has always been to backup the host via standalone agent so that can perform a bare metal restore, and the vms via vbr. Possibly in that scenario my "standalone" Agent has always been influenced by vbr, but I have been unaware of it. I wouldn't mind if Agent is in a protection group (which is something I know nothing about) but here it is preventing backups.
And yes, the reason I'm writing here is that before I uninstalled Agent, when I tried to run a backup manually I got the msg "Unable to complete the action because this backup agent is centrally managed by your system administrator." and Agent would exit. I noticed first because no emails were arriving from the veeam agent job, not even a failure message. And when I tried to reinstall agent I get the same message.

[richberman]

Did you ever resolve this? I am having the same issue. I can't it to "unmanage". I've deleted the server from the database, rebooted and still get the same error when trying to run the agent on it's own.

[Mildur]

Hello Richard

Please open a support case if no backup server is implemented in your environment and you still can see this message. Don't forget to share the case number with me.

Thank you,
Fabian