Feature Request: Select Components to Install/Upgrade

[ddasal]

We have a regulated environment which is strict on new, unneeded software, from being installed. When we run upgrades, VBR will add all the new plugins/components either from new capabilities, or from existing past capabilities. If a customer is only using 2 or 3 of those select plugins/add-on's, it would be really nice to offer an option to only upgrade the components currently installed, or to add (user selected) specific options to the installation.

We have also noticed, that some plugins seem to be auto added (Mac Client as one example) even after it has been installed when opening/using the console. This does create a lot of hassle for environments which require change requests for any new or modified software installations.

[lreed]

This really needs to be addressed. I regularly find unused components/plugins that are eating up more than a gig of ram doing nothing. The problem is even if I uninstall the offending plug in it gets reinstalled the next time you run an upgrade of VBR.

There should be an option during install to customize what plugins you want and a .1 version update shouldnt reinstall everything again. Horribly time consuming and frustrating.

[jirkava]

I am attaching my request to resolve this request. The number of unused running services is greater than the number of used services.

[BennyDC]

Hi All

Do a plus 1 for me.
We us SQL for the Veeam Config DB but postgresql did get no anyway installed with 12.3 for IntraAD
We don't gone use that but now the current release came up with an audit as an vulnerability.
I know there is a kb for this and will addressed in the next patch release.
But a bit pointless to need to patch components you don't use.

[ITinSpace]

Updating in FEB2026 after the release of VBR v13:
The additional services and plug-ins that are installed are time-consuming to remove after every update to ensure that we don't have vulnerabilities related to services running that we don't or can't use. Sometimes we can't uninstall the service/plug-in without it causing issues with the application, so we then have to block it in the host firewall. I want a backup solution that doesn't install unauthorized/unwanted software. This request has been in for over a year and even with the new VBR v13, the installer has implemented even more bloatware than what was in v12. We should be able to not install things we know we don't use in our environment. Even with multiple tickets to the support portal, we get told to put in a feature request that goes nowhere. Why can't the Veeam Dev team write an installer to allow system administrators to choose what needs to be installed? We know our working environment better than the Veeam engineers, so there's no reason to have software installed that we don't need that will take away resources from the server, open ports that create additional vulnerabilities, especially when there are untrusted self-signed certificates running on those ports since Veeam wants us to VBR with a certificate that has certificate issuance capabilities in an enterprise environment, which is typically not authorized in large enterprise environments due to the way PKI is designed. I should not have to fight with an application to get it working securely in an enterprise environment only to have the next update undo everything I've done to mitigate those vulnerabilities. Veeam is supposed to be an enterprise-friendly solution, but they aren't being very enterprise-friendly.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Sorry for the silence from R&D side on this topic. We discussed this topic internally some time ago as it came up also in other Forum threads and it was internally rejected back then. Having that said, we will discuss again and see whether we could do such things after there were some architecture changes in V13.

Best regards
Hannes

[ITinSpace]

Thank you for your response Hannes. I, and many other system administrators, anxiously await Veeam's rectification of this issue.

[Gene-MN]

+1

[ITinSpace]

To upvote this, please "like" each comment requesting this as a feature instead of adding a new comment. Apparently, per Veeam support, that's how you upvote things here in the forums, even though that process is not spelled out or documented at all in the FAQ.

[ITinSpace]

Related post:
post563781.html#p563781

[JPMS]

Sorry for the silence from R&D side on this topic. We discussed this topic internally some time ago as it came up also in other Forum threads and it was internally rejected back then. Having that said, we will discuss again and see whether we could do such things after there were some architecture changes in V13.

I was involved in a couple of those discussions and was expecting some significant improvement in v13...and got the opposite.

This was one of the discussions, where removing some of the unused extras caused future upgrades to fail! - veeam-backup-replication-f2/v12-3-1-113 ... 98022.html

Another discussion here - servers-workstations-f49/uninstalling-l ... 81348.html

In that discussion @Egor Yakovlev said:

We already have some ideas to improve the installation and upgrade experience, focusing on installable count and the logic to choose them. I am tracking such feedback with utmost care.

... so it is really disappointing to hear that was "internally rejected". Even more disappointing that nobody had the nerve to convey that to us as customers!

I'm not going to add anything to what I have said before, apart from to point out the situation has only got worse since I posted about it a year ago...

We may well be talking cross purposes here as our our site doesn't have any Linux hosts that are managed by Veeam.

As a specific example of what I am complaining about, a really simple update from 12.2 to 12.3 on a Hyper-V server. Just a dedicated Veeam server VM and the Hyper-V host. Repo is a NAS so not involved.

After the update, on the Veeam server, I have these extra programs that are not required (and, unless they were new features, had been removed before):
Veeam Plug-in for Enterprise Applications Redistibutable
Agent for Linux Redistributable
Agent for Mac Redistributable
Agent for Unix Redistributable
Veeam Threat Hunter
Veeam Backup vPowerNFS
VMwareVDDK
Microsoft Entra ID plug-in
oVirt KVM Plug-in
Promox Plug-in
Nutanix Plug-in
Azure Plug-in
Kasten Plug-in
Google Cloud Plug-in
AWS Plugin
MS Windows Desktop Runtime (required dependancy for an unwanted plug-in)
MS ASP .NET Core (required dependancy for an unwanted plug-in)
MS Edge Webview (required dependancy for an unwanted plug-in)

On the host, we get these added:
Veeam Threat Hunter
VMwareVDDK

Firstly, why doesn't the installation software add the simple option of what plug-ins you want installed (upgrade or new install)?! This would avoid 65% of the unwanted software being installed.

Secondly, why does the upgrade insist on installing upgrades to software I didn't have installed? We don't need Veeam Backup vPowerNFS and VMwareVDDK (we are Windows and Hyper-V only) so why keep reinstalling them at every upgrade, even though they weren't installed prior to the upgrade?

Thirdly, we now find that if we remove some software we don't need, like Agent for Linux Redistributable and Agent for Unix Redistributable, it just gets reinstalled when we make changes to protection groups, even though there are no Linux or Unix agents.

I can understand installing software for a new feature like Threat Hunter (even if we aren't going to use it) but all this software just has to be uninstalled again.

[sdolcourt]

I would add my +1 to this.

Veeam devs are not understanding ITAR, DFARS, CUI, NATO requirements in the modern large scale datacenter, and how the simplest approach for any system admin is to eliminate vendor phone-home, ET contacting the mothership, bloat, trash, garbage, basura, herds of goats, and unnecessary application goonery.

I stopped AWS, Azure, etc. plug in services in V13 VSA, but despite the support ticket that services would not restart after a VSA reboot, at some point, those services magically started again. VeeamONE harped at me about unable to collect analysis for the stopped services (duh), so that would require additional steps to disable those checks in VeeamONE.

Veeam devs who reject feedback from actual admins, should have to sit in SOX audit meetings from dawn to dusk. Please do not reject that customers are insisting Veeam shape the product to meet standards we face in industry. Better that Veeam's default install is bare and spare, with plug-ins as an opt-in. We do pay for that to be in our favor, you know...

[RubinCompServ]

I've been bitten by this more than once, and it's getting old.

[SLienenlueke]

I totally agree on this feature request.
Apart from the plug-ins causing warnings we are really concerned about the PostgreSQL installation.
We would really appreciate to choose only the elements that we need to install/update.

[ksimon]

This has been asked a few times and has always received a hard "NO" from the Veeam dev team.
There is at least one person who was active here in the past, who is no longer as active here, who was the voice of that 'no' on at least one occasion.
Now that that person is no longer involved in the same way, perhaps we can move beyond NO and try to build something workable.

Seriously, you folks talk about security all the time, but still have more unneeded services that are running than needed ones.

Shrinking the attack surface while returning RAM and CPU cycles to the system seems like a win to me.

[adb.scott]

One of the many reasons we are moving to or Hycu or Commvault.. Veeam is stuck being the "big player" and completely lost touch with UX/UI and workflow to name a just a few. Everything in Veeam feels Server 2003/08 and they really care less about the UX/UI, plugin auto installs etc etc..

[BradWilson]

After disabling ALL the unneeded hypervisor services I found my VBR13 install went from being incredibly slow and mostly useless to actually usable again. Rather embarassing when installing on a client site and their workable Veeam install gets "upgraded" to being useless and taking 15 minutes to get in to the console just to check their backup jobs.

[Outlaw]

I would add my +1 to this.

Veeam devs are not understanding ITAR, DFARS, CUI, NATO requirements in the modern large scale datacenter, and how the simplest approach for any system admin is to eliminate vendor phone-home, ET contacting the mothership, bloat, trash, garbage, basura, herds of goats, and unnecessary application goonery.

I stopped AWS, Azure, etc. plug in services in V13 VSA, but despite the support ticket that services would not restart after a VSA reboot, at some point, those services magically started again. VeeamONE harped at me about unable to collect analysis for the stopped services (duh), so that would require additional steps to disable those checks in VeeamONE.

Veeam devs who reject feedback from actual admins, should have to sit in SOX audit meetings from dawn to dusk. Please do not reject that customers are insisting Veeam shape the product to meet standards we face in industry. Better that Veeam's default install is bare and spare, with plug-ins as an opt-in. We do pay for that to be in our favor, you know...

+1 to all of the above

[hawkunsh]

I totally agree on this feature request.
Apart from the plug-ins causing warnings we are really concerned about the PostgreSQL installation.
We would really appreciate to choose only the elements that we need to install/update.

+1 from me. Especially the warnings are very annoying.

[MPe]

+1 from my side as well. Totally unacceptable not only from a perf perspective but from a security point of view. A simple check of what is already installed and needs to be upgraded can't be that hard.

[m.novelli]

ABSOLUTELY +1

Marco

[Dynamic]

+1 here as well - a lot of our customers are not even using those additional services/plug-ins.
And, as with JeOS - only deploy the least amount of required services: In this context this would also reduce active services, resources, and so on.

Thanks & best, Markus

[iDeNt_5]

+1 from my side.

[mkretzer]

+1

[gtelnet]

+1 with a capital PLUS

[vbussiro]

+ 1 for me
Hope the R&D will reconsider this. It's really nice to see Veeam support all those different platform and configs, but i doubt there anyone using all of these at the same time. And even it were, within the same backup server.

[ITinSpace]

Here is a related post regarding the ISO download required for installs/updates and how big it is instead of using an MSI/EXE for updates that is likely related to this post since updates/installs wouldn't need such large files if system administrators only had to download and install the things they needed. Please like and comment for these posts to gain traction with R&D.

post563781.html#p563781

[criso]

Big +1 to better security, less storage space, more RAM and CPU available. You can do it better.

[ReKe]

Also a big +1 from my side for this.

[scott.anderson]

+1 again! This was strongly "hinted" at for v13 and appears to have been forgotten again. It's getting really really annoying!