Join Veeam Appliance 13 to domain or Not to backup Hyper-v 2025 Cluster

[fbroussey]

Hi, I just want to know if it is mandatory to join the veeam Appliance 13 to the active directory domain which hyper-vhosts belong in order to backup Vms from this Hyper-v cluster.
We don’t usually do that for security reasons but i'm facing a pb with the add of a 2025 Hyper-v Cluster to Veeam 13 giving me an error :
Failed to connect to cluster cluster.clusterhv.local
Failed to create Hyper-V Cluster Wmi utils: Failed to test connection to the host cluster.clusterhv.local with OMICLI.
Possible reason:
Specified host is not a cluster node.
I open a case Veeam Software Appliance #07899013 but i'm surprised that we need to add the veeam to the domain

Do you have any feedback about that?

Thanks

[Moderator: added Support Case #]

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Frederic,
to protect Hyper-V clusters (both native and SCVMM-managed) backup server appliance must be joined to a domain.

[halvorsond]

This info surprised me - is this a requirement for backing up hyper-v clusters? Doing a quick search, i couldn't seem to find anything in particular on that requirement in the user guide/release notes

[alen88]

Hi, can someone elaborate this request in more detail?

"[For Linux-based backup servers] Both the Hyper-V nodes and the backup server must be joined to the same Active Directory domain. If they are not joined to the same Active Directory domain, additional manual configuration of the krb5.conf file is required. For more information, see Performing Maintenance Tasks." stated in documentation.

Because, I successfully added two Windows Server 2025 clusters to a different V13 setup at another customer last week without this prerequisite, and everything is working as expected.
But, today, at different customer, I want to add WS2022 cluster to the backup and Im getting:

Failed to connect to cluster xxxx
Failed to create Hyper-V Cluster Wmi utils: Failed to test connection to the host xxxx with OMICLI.
Possible reason:
Specified host is not a cluster node.

I have tested everything I could find and arrived at this thread. I have added domain joined backup proxy for gMSA, but I dont want to add backup to the domain.

Thank you.