Roadmap for Veeam B&R on linux?

[mikeely]

Regnor, keep in mind for a lot of us it's the other way around: Windows is the martian in our environment that requires special care and feeding and constant frustrating "how do I do this in Windows?" situations.

[evilaedmin]

Biggest complaint I have is Windows 10 just blatently ignores our patching schedule and patches whenever the hell it wants which is sometimes in the middle of a backup or in the middle of an offsite transfer.

Windows 10 makes certain default assumptions but you can certainly make it do what you wish. Everything you need can be found at this tree, and you can craft a local Group Policy if you are not using a AD Domain Services: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... nt/update/

[Gostev]

Regnor, keep in mind for a lot of us it's the other way around: Windows is the martian in our environment that requires special care and feeding and constant frustrating "how do I do this in Windows?" situations.

Yes, in absolutely amount. I mean, even just 1% of Veeam customers already makes it over 4000 environments, which is "a lot" indeed.

However, in relative amount, Windows currently wins hands down. I certainly don't want to start the holy war here, but for example last time I looked at VMware's own numbers, admittedly a couple of years ago, 90% of all vSphere VMs worldwide were running Windows. And in Hyper-V environments, their percent is obviously even bigger. But across these two hypervisors, this is pretty much our entire install base for Veeam Backup & Replication!

[Regnor]

Regnor, keep in mind for a lot of us it's the other way around: Windows is the martian in our environment that requires special care and feeding and constant frustrating "how do I do this in Windows?" situations.

I supposed that for a Linux admin it would be easy to administrate a Windows machine

@Anton: Will the support for XFS with SLES also include openSUSE? From my understanding both are compatible and differ in support/lifecycle.

[Gostev]

Max, let's discuss this in the corresponding existing topic, not to derail this one. Thanks!

[SmokinJoe]

FreeBSD jails on FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core run VERY fast. Too bad UNIX is considered a four lettered word.

[Tecbil]

Windows is such an overheaded OS, really not ideal to run such a resource intensive piece of software like Veeam B&R on top of it, IMHO.

[Gostev]

Popular misconception. Our performance tests of Windows vs. Linux backup proxies showed that Windows is ahead of many distros

In any case, backup server itself is not resource intensive at all. Only backup proxies are, but they can run on Linux.

[imome9a]

How on earth, in Q4 of 2021, does Veeam still not have an option to deploy Veeam Backup server and console on Linux? There should have long been an HTML5 managed Linux appliance created that allows us admins to get Veeam up and running without a Windows requirement/dependency. Its time for my business to refresh/renew our backup solutions and I was hoping to one day ditch the only remaining Windows server in our entire org, but alas, nothing. I completely get that maybe there hasn't been much of a need or development of existing platforms is the smarter financial play, but, a growing part of your customer base has been patiently waiting for a long time now. Id think that having tighter control of some of the variables of deploying a Veaam solution through a appliance could benefit Veeam. Anyways, that's my piece, I just wanted Veeam to know us Linux folk are still here, eagerly awaiting Veeam BR on Linux.

[PTide]

Hi,

Unless the question was rhetorical, please check this thread for the explanation why it takes us so long to build VBR for Linux : )

Thanks!

[SmokinJoe]

Linux runs faster on current hardware, faster than Windows 11...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... lear&num=1

[Gostev]

We did not test Windows client OS because they are optimized for a different types of workload.

However, Windows Server performed better as backup proxy than many Linux distros.

Anyhow, I'm not surprised Windows 11 is slower considering it was literally just released and still needs some polish.

[SmokinJoe]

How on earth, in Q4 of 2021, does Veeam still not have an option to deploy Veeam Backup server and console on Linux? There should have long been an HTML5 managed Linux appliance created that allows us admins to get Veeam up and running without a Windows requirement/dependency.

When VMware decided to ditch the windows VI client and go to web Flash based all of us techies told them it was a dead end. In that case the developers and PHB's made the decision to go down that dead end road and look how long it took VMware to get pure HTML5 based console that was 100% functional.

The right answer always wins, it just takes time.

I imagine there are still companies that say containers are a passing fad and they are sticking to the tried and true Windows server and Internet Explorer for everything(Dow Chemical I am looking at you!).

Thanks,
Joe

[mikeely]

Only happens once in a while but burns at least an hour when it does (also why on Earth is Server 2016 so slooooow doing updates?)

[Gostev]

Shall we pretend Linux doesn't have same or worse issues? And is magically the only flawless software on the planet without any bugs?

https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+k ... te+failure

Let's not start the holy war. First, every OS has bugs, and picking on a particular one in trying to make some point is not a strong argument. For example, I personally never saw such a message and didn't even know it exist. Second, this doesn't even have to be an OS bug: could be due to the lack of disk space, crappy 3rd party antivirus messing things up etc.

Anyway, for us the deciding factor is that the vast majority of our existing customers are simply not comfortable using Linux due to the lack of expertise. So, moving from Windows to Linux is out of question. Maybe one day we will have enough R&D staff to consider maintaining backup server on multiple platforms, but those days are yet to come...

[mikeely]

Eh, we run hundreds of Linux servers and update hundreds of Linux servers, even kernel and glibc updates take a minute or two. BIOS and RAID card initialization is by far the longest part of the update on physical hosts.

I wouldn't mind so much if Windows weren't so opaque about what its problem is most of the time - sorting the eventlog is not much fun - and again half an hour just to do updates is both beyond the pale and totally normal for Server 2016.

I totally get why Veeam doesn't have B&R on HTML5 from a Linux server, but I sure wish it did just the same.

[Gostev]

I actually agree that update installation performance is an area of improvement for Windows. They've been touting some new tech in this regard for a long while now, so it's about time they bring it to market.

Not talking about hot kernel patching in Server 2022 (although that looks really impressive) but rather those update size improvements they promised. Should help with the installation time primarily.

[EDIT] wait, it may have just arrived finally https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ho ... h-smaller/

[mikeely]

Not quite the same, at least I think not. But that might be just my misunderstanding of the Windows kernel architecture. With Linux (at least when kpatch isn't being used) all that happens is the new kernel image gets dropped into the filesystem and is run from the next boot, but Windows certainly looks like it's compiling stuff into place. I'm sure there are reasons for doing this that make sense but it's bound to be slower, IMHO.

That said, it is a nice improvement over the older way of doing things, and I'll agree that my Windows 11 box does update faster than it did running 10.

[SmokinJoe]

Hi All,

Any discussion of the Linux proxy also being a tape server as well so that locally saved repo files can be written to that local tape device?

Thanks,
Joe

[Mildur]

Hi Joe

Any discussion of the Linux proxy also being a tape server as well so that locally saved repo files can be written to that local tape device?

There is a topic for

Linux as a Tape server

Looks like veeam is looking in to this if it could be implemented into one of veeams next versions (statement from april 2021).

[Gostev]

Can confirm - Linux as a Tape server is planned for V12. Plus a few other components ;)

[Mildur]

Wonderful, thanks Anton

[SmokinJoe]

Can confirm - Linux as a Tape server is planned for V12.

Is there a way to test it today or manually add it via scripts?

[Gostev]

No.

[hbilke]

Howdy fellas,

Biggest complaint I have is Windows 10 just blatently ignores our patching schedule and patches whenever the hell it wants which is sometimes in the middle of a backup or in the middle of an offsite transfer. That I would say is the biggest reason for using the server OS and really is the main reason I'd like to see linux.

I'd much rather see hypervisor expansion on the roadmap than linux though. Supporting Proxmox and the other open source hypervisors would be far more valuable to me than linux.

That could even happen w/cluster-nodes W2k12R2 - we triple checked w/MS support: our settings and GPOs were correct and the nodes should neither have applied patches nor rebooted w/o admin's consent!

My 2 cents on Windows as the B&R "console".
We had the "policy": find the best application to get the job done and don't care at all whether it's running on Windoze, OS X, *nix. All OSses have their own pros - cons - glitches - weirdnesses.
At our shop the internal IT staff is full blown *nix nerds "dancers" - we don't use any MS-stuff for production (one department is supporting it, though) BUT after having evaluated they DO use Veeam B&R w/Windoze console and running all other Veeam-stuff on *nix.

hRy

[himel]

Hi
Is there any roadmap at all for Veeam VBR to be able to run on Linux in V12/V13. I am asking because some of our customers are very much concerned about security and they have switched their almost 100% environment to Linux.

Maximum of Veeam competitors like Dell, Commvault, Veritas also support Linux-based management server. Hope the Veeam R&D team will take this seriously.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Please see the discussion and answers above. We count your request +1

Best regards,
Hannes

[SmokinJoe]

some of our customers are very much concerned about security and they have switched their almost 100% environment to Linux.

Maximum of Veeam competitors like Dell, Commvault, Veritas also support Linux-based management server. Hope the Veeam R&D team will take this seriously.

I hope we get some goodies on Linux, it is a server product so no need for the windows desktop carry over. Heck WSL would allow a windows die hard to still use it if they refused to spin up a VM or VMware .OVA appliance.

Thanks,
Joe

[Tom Lico]

I'd like to add my +1 vote too.

Me, being a Linux admin, currently working with a Windows Server machine, purely to be able to use Veeam B&R in our environment. IMHO, that's a waste of a license.

Linux is becoming a lot more interesting the last few years, due to the fact that Veeam is a market leading product, and due to the prices Microsoft is asking for licensing their products.

Deploying a linux based Veeam B&R server would definitely be a great solution for just about any company. Less overhead, less licensing troubles, a lot more versatility. Not to mention being able to gain the other half of the market too, which would be a huge part when looking at the market.

Currently, the amount of Linux/Windows servers is around the 50/50% margin. I'd guess that about 15-20% are full-on linux-only server environments (no dependency for Windows), which would be depending on just one Windows+Veeam server. This would definitely be a reason for a lot of linux admins to not deploy a Veeam solution to their ecosystem. That's a huge market that hasn't been covered by Veeam yet.

Are there any plans for even looking at the possibility to develop Veeam for Linux? Are there any too much obstacles to get it to run on Linux? Would it be possible to reconsider or even reevaluate the pros and cons?

The Veeam for Linux repository has been (and still is) a great addition to our environment. As will the Linux as a Tape server functionality be. Though we'd definitely prefer a Linux based Veeam server. And I know a lot of other Linux (and even Windows) admins would, too.

Just my 2ct about the matter. It would definitely make an impact in the world of backing up your data.

[wishr]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for the feedback. Noted.