Run time linux proxy server

[owen.wright]

+1 for linux backup proxy and veeam appliance in general.

[bertdhont]

+1 for linux backup proxy!!

[widmerkarl]

Many people here and out there are requesting linux proxies and all that has been said from veeam side was "We would like but there are some technical limitations which make it impossible for using linux as proxy appliance".

Ok, good to know but I'm curious to hear what the limitations are... From a customer's point of view, the roles of a proxy are:

- reading data from disks
- sending data over network to repository
- connecting with os's for script execution, vss, etc.

I think the first two arguments could also be managed by linux, probably the last one would be more tricky or even impossible. Are my assumptions right or is it more about incompatibilities with file systems and such things?

I know that we are here talking about technical details which could be top secret for veeam and I understand that veeam tries to hide those information, but probably there is a way to give us here a better understanding why only windows can do the job without giving too much information. Sometimes you have discussions about licensing and costs and then you should be able to argue why only windows can do the job...

I think, but that's just my personal view, it is because of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service. I'm not a Linux pro. I don't know if there is a tool, or something, that can be executed from Linux, to execute a VSS within Windows OS. But as we know it already, Veeam is "agentless", but that means only that the VSS agent is injected during runtime of backup and removed afterwards. So it's not really a Linux thing. Also Linux should be able to inject a Windows service into a Windows VM and remove it after backup.

[Fred_vBrain]

Hi all,

I think this isn't a new request but I wanted to push this again because I can't assume that there are no more customer or people wanting to have this!

Currently I have a customer running several clusters because of licensing constraints. The only problem is that you would need at least one proxy per cluster to backup the machines with hot-add. NDB is not an option because of the performance. In that case the customer would need to license the whole cluster with Windows just for this single proxy server. This can be very costly when having a big cluster.

Cheers,
Fred

[YouGotServered]

I've gotta agree here, +1 for a Linux proxy appliance. My SQL team would go bananas if I deployed a Veeam proxy on their production VM so that I could get faster backups off that host

The Windows proxies are fantastic, don't get me wrong, but we would definitely see wider adoption if there were a free (aka, non $900 for 2 2016 VMs if you only have 8 cores or less) option.

[Gostev]

we would definitely see wider adoption if there were a free (aka, non $900 for 2 2016 VMs if you only have 8 cores or less) option.

But you don't have to go with Windows Server? Remember we support client OS versions as well, which are the same exact kernel as Windows Server - but so much cheaper. And you still get automatic and prompt security patching for those, which is a big benefit over Linux appliances, where you are dependent on the vendor to find vulnerabilities and issues patches (and no vendor will ever have a security team on staff with hundreds of world's best security engineers constantly looking for vulnerabilities, like Microsoft has).

[totoche]

And they do not stop in finding ...

[YouGotServered]

But you don't have to go with Windows Server? Remember we support client OS versions as well, which are the same exact kernel as Windows Server - but so much cheaper. And you still get automatic and prompt security patching for those, which is a big benefit over Linux appliances, where you are dependent on the vendor to find vulnerabilities and issues patches (and no vendor will ever have a security team on staff with hundreds of world's best security engineers constantly looking for vulnerabilities, like Microsoft has).

Ah, duh. Good point Gostev. I guess being in the enterprise space, I never thought about a desktop OS. Definitely a cheaper alternative for sure.

If they were Linux appliances, however, I would be deploying them like Oprah. "YOU get a proxy! YOU get a proxy! AND YOU get a proxy!"

[csydas]

And they do not stop in finding ...

Well what do you expect? Linux appliance is non-trivial due to VSS, I would assume. Like, for the most basic operations (crash consistent), I'm sure it'd work. But what good is a crash consistent in most cases? When 95% of your workload is Windows, what are you going to do? You can't get in on those Oracle and SQL VMs without VSS. If there's some secret you know about getting VSS interactions on Linux, it'd be great if you could share. But the work flow is clear here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... s.10).aspx

You've gotta have something interacting with VSS services. And I have to believe MS would be protecting that pretty strongly, so reverse engineering is right out. So you'd be left with a new component to install and basically have to work from the ground up on a bunch of different server components Windows side.

Now, a Linux appliance for Linux, that'd be great and pretty spiffy. Even give it a plugin and let vendors and devs build their own quiescencing plugins or whatever.

But the point is, a Linux appliance isn't just some trivial thing. It's not a matter of "port the veeam agent over to *nix and call it a day", you lose tons of functionality.

[mcz]

csydas, microsoft-links seems to be dead, can you please correct it? Thanks!

[Gostev]

@Michael, I've fixed the link for you.

But the point is, a Linux appliance isn't just some trivial thing. It's not a matter of "port the veeam agent over to *nix and call it a day", you lose tons of functionality.

Correct. I would put it this way - it would be trivial if Veeam was not so advanced and had all those "invisible" features that make a huge difference. For example, one type of issues we've ran into is our advanced NTFS processing features like BitLooker: they work perfectly on Windows proxies (using native NTFS driver), but crash left and right on Linux proxy with its NTFS driver. We wasted much time on this issue and gave up at some point.

One valid use case for Linux proxy that I am considering is the protection of clusters running purely Linux workloads - we do have such customers and this functionality would benefit them. There, we obviously would not have to worry about all that NTFS-related functionality. But then again, how do you prevent the rest of users from getting excited, deploying Linux proxies everywhere else and starting to open support cases complaining how this or that no longer works, or performs worse? That is always my challenge - how to ensure that some new feature does not impact customer satisfaction with our solution, considering that just about nobody reads the manual?

All in all, our choice of Windows platform for everything comes from one simple number - 90% of all VMs running on vSphere run Windows OS. It's not that we do not have any Linux expertise - if you were using Veeam back in its early versions, you know that all this product could do originally is process VMs running on "fat" ESX host with [effectively] an on-host Linux-based proxy. However, the introduction of ESXi and some our first innovations - as well as very limited development resources - have pushed us to focus on Windows proxies at the time.

[mcz]

Anton, thanks for fixing the link.

But then again, how do you prevent the rest of users from getting excited, deploying Linux proxies everywhere else and starting to open support cases complaining how this or that no longer works, or performs worse? That is always my challenge - how to ensure that some new feature does not impact customer satisfaction with our solution, considering that just about nobody reads the manual?

Probably there should be tons of warnings/information during proxy deployment which tells the users that linux appliances only work with linux vm's. Another option would be that during sessions like backup, replication, etc. an information record would be displayed e.g.

"source VM has Windows OS, therefore linux-proxies won't be used"

Probably this idea isn't new and has already been discussed before, but if not, it will probably help

[Gostev]

Yes, I was thinking of simply enlightening our intelligent load balancer so that it won't assign Linux proxies to Windows VMs in cases when those advanced guest processing options are enabled in the job settings (which they are by default). Should be doable, but I did not discuss this with the devs yet as we're not working on Linux proxies for the immediate update.

[Cragdoo]

But you don't have to go with Windows Server? Remember we support client OS versions as well, which are the same exact kernel as Windows Server - but so much cheaper. And you still get automatic and prompt security patching for those, which is a big benefit over Linux appliances, where you are dependent on the vendor to find vulnerabilities and issues patches (and no vendor will ever have a security team on staff with hundreds of world's best security engineers constantly looking for vulnerabilities, like Microsoft has).

All depends on your license level. As a service provider with a SPLA agreement we cannot run desktop OS on our clusters

[Gostev]

Wow. Even if you BYOL for those Windows 10 machines?

[YouGotServered]

@cragdoo, thanks for the reminder. That leaves our data center out of the question here. So desktop licensing would work at our clients, but not our larger hosting environment with SPLA licensing.

@gostev - I'm not a licensing expert, but it is my belief you cannot mix the two licensing styles. I hope I'm wrong, but that's the answer I got from our licensing advisor.

[dvkvashnin]

Support case 02838273
Please let me know the date when will be backup proxy server on OS RHEL or contacts that will be able to answer on my question

[Gostev]

Hi, Dmitry - this functionality is not in our short-term roadmap, however in general it is on the table and will be considered for future releases. Thanks!

[jamcool]

A locked down Linux based proxy server would be nice. Then do not have to deal with licensing and patching OS of Window servers. Also some of our support products (like anti-virus and system monitoring) are based on number of Window severs you have. Be nice not to have to license for these as well. I know the competition uses Linux proxy servers and deployed via management console.

[George_Washington]

A locked down Linux based proxy server would be nice. Then do not have to deal with licensing and patching OS of Window servers. Also some of our support products (like anti-virus and system monitoring) are based on number of Window severs you have. Be nice not to have to license for these as well. I know the competition uses Linux proxy servers and deployed via management console.

Not only that, but Veeam's competitors are already supplying Linux appliances with their product. I.e. Dell EMC's Avamar has all their proxy appliances running on SUSE 11.

[dimaslan]

We have seen tremendous gain in backup job speeds when using VMs as proxies, and it's not uncommon for a customer to have enough VMs of considerable size to justify using 2 or more proxies.
To be specific, for customers that have 2 or hosts with 10+ VMs and we deploy a physical Veeam BDR server, we often get subpar speeds due to the nbd mode used.
For rare occasions the SAN is compatible, but for most we have achieved an increase in speed with hotadd when using existing VMs as proxies in testing.
This is not a permanent solution however, and even for an MSP provider to have to deploy 1 or 2 proxies with full Windows server licenses is something to consider.
Is there any way or any plans from Veeam to include Linux servers to be used as backup proxies?
This would be a great help.

Thank you.

[foggy]

Hi Dimitris, please see this thread for our stance regarding Linux-based proxies. Thanks!

[alexs]

Hi

Is there or has there been any chat about using linux as the underlying OS for backup server or for a Proxy host.

I'm looking to setup a proxy to help backup my VM's but I am going to be slugged with WINOS tax...

[HannesK]

Hello,
for the backup server (the manager) it's not realistic. For repository it's already available. For proxies we are thinking about it - stay tuned.

How big is your environment? Because many installations (~100TB / 500-800VMs) are just a single Windows physical machine where it makes no sense to think about adding additional proxies / repositories.

Best regards,
Hannes

[MopedTobias]

Hi,

as the topic implies, are there any plans for such a solution? What I imagine is a reduced to the max micro appliance that can be deployed as a VM and maybe only during backup processes - some kind of docker style...

Benefits:
* no Windows host required
* no update of proxy required
* no deadlock of backup the host that runs the proxy for backups
* smart

[HannesK]

merged with existing requests. please see the answers above.

[alexs]

How big is your environment? Because many installations (~100TB / 500-800VMs) are just a single Windows physical machine where it makes no sense to think about adding additional proxies / repositories.

Hi

3 datacentres - maybe 2 more coming - out of state, about 150-200 VM's

Seems like a no brainer - you can make it very easy for people, by building an appliance - link it to centos or ? for easy maintenance, then all I have to do it install an appliance and I am good to go

Alex

[colohost]

Just painfully looking through Windows license cost records and was curious if there are any long term plans to build a Bacukp & Replication release that would allow for the server components, or at least the proxies who are simply feeding mapped snapshots to storage, to run on Linux instead of Windows?

Thanks

[HannesK]

Hello,
I merged your request with the existing thread. If you have access to the private beta, then you can already test Linux proxies.

No plans for the backup server. Usually, there are not many of them per customer. Development time would be extremely high.

Best regards,
Hannes

[hjanssen]

Hello,

Are there any updates regarding the availability to install Veeam on a Linux environment, or an other option would be that Veeam is delivered via a appliance?

In most cases we do not have a Windows environment and we do not want to install/use Windows just for Veeam. Why is there still! no other option then installing on a Windows environment?

I hope this is on the road map?

Kind regards