Veeam Appliance on baremetal - hardware component maintenance

[michawel]

Hi, just question. Customer requires Physical baremetal installation of Veeam BR Appliance + Veeam HRA. As because both JEOS systems are partially locked my question is related to driver management. How Veeam recommend to do this? On Dell we are using DSU and on HPE we are using Service pack tool however this requires specific package on operating system. What is recommended way to do this? Because especially NIC drivers are very critical and occasionaly bugged. BTW dsu on JEOS does not work. I understand that Veeam does not allow to install packages on JEOS however this will be in conflict with HW vendor. I understand that Veeam tries to be hardware agnostic however still drivers required. What about some support matrix for net adapters, hba adapters - I know it is Red Hat related but Rocky Linux is not Redhat.
Many thanks for clear answer.

[Andreas Neufert]

In most of the cases the hardware drivers that come with the OS (Kernel) are OK and perform very well in our tests comparing with additional drivers from the vendors. However we are checking which 100GbE cards are out of the box working and will update here soon. Potentially we will update the underlaying OS or Kernel to have newer drivers available with the OS by default.

In case of hardware we recommend to look into the vendor verified hardware, it lists as well options on how to upgrade firmwre and in general on how to setup the system: https://www.veeam.com/solutions/allianc ... -appliance

[Gostev]

I would link the actual System Requirements as they directly touch some questions raised in your post.

[michawel]

Thank you for reply however I am not fully satisfied with. We will install to customer baremetal VBA (Appliance) + VHR. First one will be on Dell PE660 with Broadcom 57504 quadport adapter. Second Dell PE760 with same Broadcom card. According my experience the biggest problems are with NIC cards and these problems are usually fixed by new drivers and followed by firmwares. In case of firmwares we are able to update it over iDrac, so primary drivers are important for us. On the other side - Dell also occasionally requires to run some tools for seamless support for deep diagnostic.
If I understand your plan is to provide affected drivers over your repos. Am I right?
What about management agents (already mentioned somewhere)? If no agents allowed do you calculate with some specialized access for major management platforms? I mean something like management pack for SCOM etc.
Understand me - we are living in world full of certified solutions and typical problem is that Dell/HPE support denying help with some issues until we have all drivers and firmware up to date.

[Gostev]

Your last sentence is exactly to the point. This is why our recommendation is to use Veeam Ready Appliance certified hardware. Since V13 early availability release has been made available, first vendors have already started to certify their hardware so the list above has been growing fast in the past few weeks... and it's only the beginning!

This certification ensures verified and certified compatibility, delivering an optimal customer experience through additional requirements for direct technical collaboration between vendors. This way there's no finger pointing between Veeam and hardware vendor when something does not work, because these specific hardware configurations were explicitly tested and certified. And if something changes in future, we can work directly with the hardware vendor to validate any new configurations and include required drivers in the software appliance.

And we will be taking this even further in 2026 by offering a new option of fully "as a service" VBR offering where Veeam is responsible for managing the entire backup infrastructure stack (including even firmware patching). So all you do is just use our software and don't worry about anything else. Sharing it just in case this is something you would be interested in going forward.