Migrating Veeam Agent for Windows Free to B&R

[taalas]

Hi,

in our SMB environment we have been using the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE to backup a couple of workstations to a SMB share on a Fujitsu Celvin NAS (which is basically a standard QNAP device). This has been working well for quite a while.

To backup our virtual infrastructure (one Hyper-V host with 4 VMs) we have recently started using Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition on a separate physical server. Backing up the 4 VMs to the NAS share is now working perfectly as well.

To manage the previously installed Veeam agents we are currently pondering whether to include them in the B&R installation or leave them separate.

Can the current installations be used or will B&R install a different version of the agent? Will we be able to import the agent's configurations and existing backups or would it be better/necessary to create new backup jobs for them? I had seen the "unmanaged" section in B&R, which agents appear in that section?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community taalas!

Can the current installations be used or will B&R install a different version of the agent?

Agent needs to be reinstalled from Veeam B&R server. In order to do that you need to create a new protection group, add desired hosts and then start rescan process (it will install latest agent version automatically).

Will we be able to import the agent's configurations and existing backups or would it be better/necessary to create new backup jobs for them?

Unfortunately that's not possible and backup job within Veeam B&R needs to be created from scratch. However, you can use previously created backup files for recovery within Veeam B&R. Import those backup files to the B&R console, once done you can start the recovery process. Cheers!

[taalas]

Thanks for your quick reply! This already helps alot.

Do I need to uninstall the existing free agent on the clients? Or will B&R take care of replacing the installed client?

Also, and this is only kind of related: I currently have created a separate backup job for every VM I want to back up (mainly to be able to have different settings for them). Is there any downside with this versus creating a single backup job for all VMs?

[Dima P.]

Do I need to uninstall the existing free agent on the clients? Or will B&R take care of replacing the installed client?

Veeam B&R can do that.

I currently have created a separate backup job for every VM I want to back up (mainly to be able to have different settings for them). Is there any downside with this versus creating a single backup job for all VMs?

The only note here will be storage consumption: with VM backup deduplication is working on 'per-job' level, so splitting vms across multiple jobs will consume more space. Cheers!

[Mildur]

If you use vm backup Jobs, then storage savings is better in a single backup job.

With the veeam agents, no storage savings happens between the different agents within a single backup job