Run Veeam agent for Windows on a virtualised server?

[Dolphin]

Can the Veeam agent for Windows be used on a virtualised Windows Server?

[wishr]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dolphin]

Thanks for your reply! Could you clarify when i would more advisable to use the Veeam Backup and replication in place of the Windows Agent?

[wishr]

Sure.

In most cases when you have more than just a single VM, you would like to use Veeam Backup & Replication since it provides centralized job management not only for VM jobs including backup, backup copy, and others but also for the rest of Veeam products and their jobs including Veeam Agent-based backup jobs and policies. Standalone Veeam Agents would be useful if you'd like to back up a single physical machine, for example, your personal laptop, and do not have strict requirements dictated by internal policies and compliance.

Technically speaking, while both VM backup and Agent backup are image-level backups, our VM backup is different in comparison with Veeam Agent-based backup. The first is done via hypervisor APIs, while the second is based on the Microsoft VSS technology.

What kind of applications do you have running on your VMs? I'm asking because, for example, Agent Management of VBR is the recommended way of backing up Microsoft SQL failover clusters.

Thanks

[Dolphin]

The host is just running one Windows Server 2012R2 VM, which in turn is running as a DC, a file server & SQL Server. SQL Server is backed up daily, we don't need more as we have only 3 users, rarely accessing the DB

[wishr]

Well, if you are not planning to be expanding the landscape, and the backup scope is expected to be a single VM, you a free to choose any of the two products. If an expansion is possible, then VBR is certainly a better option for you.

[Dolphin]

Thanks for clarifying