ARM support for VeeamAgent

[NateDavis]

Hey Veeam Team,

I opened a support request just to have it logged somewhere - Case # 00249103

But was curious of anyone else wanted ARM support for the VeeamAgent. Here is the scenario in our environment:

1. Onsight Local Disk Backups on Dedicated Veeam Backup Server.
2. Raspberry Pi at Offsite location - running Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) with a 3TB Fireproof / Waterproof HD plugged in via USB.

The Raspberry Pi's only job is to run the VeeamAgent to do WAN based backups. In the event of needing these backups in a DR scenario, I anticipated plugging the FP/WP HD into a better machine, and re-importing the backup files, and then walking through the restore steps on a new ESXi host. We have about 5GB of data that changes each night on a total on 42 VMs.

Because the VeeamAgent that is pushed to a Linux machine is written in Perl, and the Raspbian OS has the lastest Perl, and all the modules needed, it
should run no problem. The problem I have found in my troubleshooting so far is the Binary file that is copied to /tmp after connection is 32-bit only. Thus it can't expand on an ARM CPU, and thus never actually works. A couple of options, would be to copy the veeam agent over as a tar archive, and then untar it, and run a script or something to launch, or cross compile the binary that expands the perl items to support ARM. Obviously, I have no clue if the 700mhz ARM CPU is even powerful enough to do efficient WAN backups. I purchased the Raspberry Pi to test and see. There are quite a bit of ARM based boards that are much faster for a marginal amount of money more.

Because I have not clue if this is even on the radar at Veeam I will be resorting to plan b, and have already purchased an Intel NUC celeron machine that is x86/x64 compatible. Just cost me $300 from Amazon with 32GB internal mSATA SSD, Wifi Card, and 4GB of RAM. Instead of the $60 the Raspberry Pi cost me with Case, and Wifi Card and 4gb SD Card. The goal here was to have something super small sitting ontop of the ioSafe HD and be set behind a computer at another of our remote offices.

Just wanted to see if anyone else had any interest in Veeam pursuing ARM support for their Linux VeeamAgent. If so, comment away so we can show Veeam there is some interest.

[dellock6]

Hi Nate,
there are in these forums some other threads involving low-level NAS using arm chipset, and the problem of not beeing able to run the VeeamAgent on it. honestly, their overall performances are so low that I'm doubtful the local VeeamAgent would give some gain, maybe a little bit but probably not enough to justify the effort of creating it.
Usually, when looking for a linux-based nas, I always check if the CPU is an X86 right because of this issue.

Luca.

[Gostev]

Luca is spot on. Not going to happen, those procs are way too weak. Besides, ARM-based boxes typically have too little RAM to accommodate agent needs.

[NateDavis]

OK, thanks for the insight. We will return our Pis, and move forward with the x86 stuff. Thanks again.

[devzero]

i would consider banana pi board ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi - available here for around 40 euros here in germany) a good "low power diy nas" solution for storing veeam backups at branch offices. but if veeam agent requirement is 2gb/concurrent session even for storing backups only, that indeed is too few ram inside so that porting veeam agent to linux/arm could make sense. so it`s probably only good for being used as ssh/cifs storage.

[nixcamic]

Now that ARM is becoming a much more mainstream and performant platform, is ARM support planned for the Linux agent? Previous requests for ARM support were dismissed because ARM was "not performant enough" "only used by hobbyists" or "not mainstream" but none of those arguments really hold water anymore.

[Xoba]

Please do it. ARM is beautiful, thousands of happy people will thank you. There are a lot of pretty powerful NAS with 16GB of RAM.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Just to be sure... this topic is from 2013. At that time, Veeam Agent for Linux did not exist. The whole topics is about running the Data Mover directly on ARM (aka. repository server on ARM)

Best regards,
Hannes