Feature Request to Keep Veeam in our Company

[chrisBrindley]

Over the last six months i have been asking and requesting advice on file level and VSS agent that Veeam injects into the local VM. There are posts and responses from Gostev but no suggestions.
We are a hosting company that has nearly 1700 vms that are customer ran, Some are in customers domains and workgroups and so a default domain account with admin rights is not going to work.
To maintain PCI compliance we are not allowed a default admin account on every machine. What we came up with us a custom setup, we install an admin account on the server that is different on every vm, and this password changes every 24 hours.
So this is where the nightmare begins, we could go into the advance tab and set the account on every vm, this may take me about 3 months to do on 1700 machine, plus the additional 100 we are getting every month, and then i would have to update these accounts every 24 hours.

So what i am asking for and would be a way for Veeam to stay in managed hosting companies is a static agent, that is installed by the admin account once and then runs constantly.

If anyone has any other suggestions on how to do this i am all ears, we are trying the get credentials powershell script, but the passwords are kept in an encrypted sql database so it isnt an easy task

[Gostev]

So this is where the nightmare begins, we could go into the advance tab and set the account on every vm, this may take me about 3 months to do on 1700 machine, plus the additional 100 we are getting every month, and then i would have to update these accounts every 24 hours.

Hi Chris, actually this was resolved in v7 with the Credentials Manager. You no longer have to type in user name and password in application-aware processing options for every VM, instead you just pick the predefined credentials object, and those are managed (and updated) centrally.

So, sounds like what you need is v7 and a very simple script that will synchronize actual guest passwords with the corresponding credentials object in Veeam.

More importantly though, please note that adding a static agent will not help with your issue in any way, as the job still requires valid credentials to authenticate with the guest before it can interact with any process running in the guest. So, whether there is a static agent or runtime process, you will need to solve the credentials problem by syncing actual passwords into the credentials objects in Veeam. And trust me, you do not want to get into agent management hell when talking about 1700 VMs. Just imagine the effort required to update those with every patch alone, when you have 1700 VMs with different admin passwords

[chrisBrindley]

Gostev
instead you just pick the predefined credentials object, do you have any example of this being used or how to use it.

thank you

[Gostev]

Hi Chris, not sure I understand your question. What example are you looking for?

[tdewin]

Gostev
instead you just pick the predefined credentials object, do you have any example of this being used or how to use it.

thank you

It is just part of v7. When you are in the screen of AAIP you will see a dropdown box with credentials that are already defined:
http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/v ... ss_vm.html

The credentials itself are stored in the credential manager. In this case you could access it via the "manage credentials" button:
http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/v ... tials.html

In case you don't want to manage it via the job, you can access it via the main menu (it is the blue button in the top left corner of the screen where you can also access the logs or update your license key)

[Gostev]

Hi Chris, as far as I know our solution architect is scheduled to visit you shortly, he will be able to assist you with this in person!

[chrisdearden]

I am?

[chrisBrindley]

do you know when i will be getting a call.
thanks

[tsightler]

Chris, I sent you a PM here on the forum with my contact info but haven't seen a response. I don't have your direct contact info (well, I might, but I don't have any way to verify that it is correct) so that's why I reached out via the forum.

[Gostev]

^ this guy