Deploy Agent to Workstation (access denied)

[ChillyHellion]

Hello, I'm trying to set up Veeam B&R Community Edition at home so that I can maintain familiarity with the software we use at work. I'd like to backup my own desktop workstation and my wife's desktop workstation as well. I have the B&R solution installed on my desktop and have set up a backup repository to a connected external HDD. The trouble is that when I attempt to deploy the Windows Agent to either workstation, I get the same error message: "Unable to install backup agent: cannot connect to <desktop name> Error: Access is denied."

I have added the credentials of the administrator accounts on each desktop and saved them with the computer objects in the Inventory node of the menu. Am I doing something fundamentally wrong in how I'm deploying Veeam?

Thank you,

Edit: I should add that my desktop is running the B&R software and also is one of the backup targets. That is to say, the agent is having "access denied" errors when attempting to deploy to itself, in addition to my wife's PC.

[ChillyHellion]

Chatting briefly with Veeam support on the web site, it sounds like Veeam does not deploy agents at all. Instead Veeam connects to a hypervisor (VMware or Hyper-V) and negotiates with the hypervisor to capture backups, no agents required. In case you have to protect a physical machine, you would need to manually install the Veeam Agent for Windows and configure it to use B&R as a repository.

I'm going to attempt this installation this afternoon and see what happens.

[ChillyHellion]

I gave it a try and the newly installed Agent for Windows is unable to connect to the backup repository: "unable to obtain a Veeam Agent for Windows license from the backup server. Failed to process <desktop name>: host already registered, please rescan the host".

I'm not sure if web support is correct in this case, since the error I initially received does seem to indicate that Veeam B&R is trying to push an agent to the physical host, but failing with a generic "access denied" message. I'm not quite sure what to think anymore, expect that Veeam may not be the best solution for home desktop backup.

[ChillyHellion]

Okay, so support was incorrect; you absolutely can deploy a Veeam Agent for Windows binary to a physical machine and manage it as part of your B&R job. The problem in my case is that the Admin share (c$) for the workstations is disabled by default on a non-domained installation of Windows 10. The error information did not indicate this as a dependency, nor did I see anything about it in Veeam's documentation.

Enabling the admin share on the workstations resolved the issue and I was able to deploy the agent to the physical workstations.
Hopefully the error message can be updated from the generic "access denied" to a more helpful "could not connect to $admin share on target computer" or something of that nature. I should be set for now on the deployment and access side.

[Gostev]

Thanks for posting the solution

Just wanted to note that there's no web support - those chat folks are not support engineers, they are there to help you find answers to basic questions about products and licensing. I'm actually quite impressed with the depth of answers they provided in regards to our hypervisor backups the only thing they did not know is that Veeam Backup & Replication provides centralized agent management these days (their answer was correct, but as of a couple of years ago).

[ChillyHellion]

Thank you for the context, Gostev! That does clear some things up for me. I hope that you have a happy new year!

[JJT211]

Okay, so support was incorrect; you absolutely can deploy a Veeam Agent for Windows binary to a physical machine and manage it as part of your B&R job. The problem in my case is that the Admin share (c$) for the workstations is disabled by default on a non-domained installation of Windows 10. The error information did not indicate this as a dependency, nor did I see anything about it in Veeam's documentation.

Enabling the admin share on the workstations resolved the issue and I was able to deploy the agent to the physical workstations.
Hopefully the error message can be updated from the generic "access denied" to a more helpful "could not connect to $admin share on target computer" or something of that nature. I should be set for now on the deployment and access side.

Can you elaborate on how to enable the Admin share?

[HannesK]

this came up as first hit when I searched Google for: enable admin share windows 10

https://www.wintips.org/how-to-enable-a ... windows-7/ - looks good to me