Installing Veeam Agent for Windows on Hyper-V Host

[Brad403]

Hello,

I'm curious is anyone else has done this and installed Veeam Agent for Windows on Hyper-V host? I'm currently using Veeam Backup & Replication to backup all my VMs, but was thinking it might not be bad idea to have a backup of my host in case of hard drive failure. I do have RAID1 setup for the host, but figured it couldn't hurt to have backup of it as well and save me the time of having to reconfigure Hypervisor. Would using Veeam Backup and Replication and Veeam Agent for Windows cause any issues on the host as I know the host already has some Veeam services running on it for B&R.

[Dima P.]

Hello Brad,

Such installation is possible if you want to protect the Hyper-V server, but I'd strongly recommend you to use Veeam B&R jobs to protect virtual machines. Cheers!

[danaos]

In my experience, you can't do it to B&R itself.

You can't install Agent v3 or v4 on Hyper-V there is a version check during install which doesn't allow it to install on Windows Core variants, and I couldn't find a way round it - if there are command line options to skip the version check I'm not aware of them. If you use B&R 10, it doesn't support v2 as a client, so you can't use Agent v2 on Hyper-V (I'm running 2016) to send to B&R as a repository.

What I do instead is use Agent v2 to backup on a schedule to a shared folder for the Hyper-V host partition, on a weekly basis. This at least gives me a recovery option for the Hyper-V host part of the system. All VMs are being backed up via B&R itself.

Dan

[Dima P.]

Hello Dan,

You can't install Agent v3 or v4 on Hyper-V there is a version check during install which doesn't allow it to install on Windows Core variants, and I couldn't find a way round it - if there are command line options to skip the version check I'm not aware of them. If you use B&R 10, it doesn't support v2 as a client, so you can't use Agent v2 on Hyper-V (I'm running 2016) to send to B&R as a repository.

Windows Server Core are supported only with managed by Veeam B&R server agents in Server mode. Standalone agents indeed do not support installation on Core. Cheers!

[danaos]

Hi Dima,

Ah, I'd missed that part of the Agent system requirements that links to a different document for server managed mode. We are using Veeam B&R with the free agent only as we don't require central management and the extra costs of the Agent, but we do have licenses for VM backups from our Hyper-V servers. So to use B&R with our Hyper-V servers, of which we have two, we'd have to buy around 50 agent licenses because it's not possible to mix standalone and managed agents, even though we have no need for managed agents (other than to backup the two Hyper-V servers to B&R).

Dan

[Brad403]

Thanks for the replies. I did test try this out the other night in a lab environment. Installed and setup Veeam B&R on my laptop and then did a fresh install of Windows Server 2016 on my Dell Precision desktop and installed the Hyper-V role on it. Setup Hyper-V server as a standalone and backed up my VMs. After that I was able to install Veeam Agent for Windows on my hypervisor and it worked. Will install Veeam Agent for Windows on my production Hyper-V server this weekend.