Use VBR Server to Backup Its Own Windows Server

[BackupBytesTim]

What's the best way to go about using VBR to back up the server it's running on? My understanding was that VBR could only back up VMs via their hypervisor, so it couldn't back up it's own server unless it happened to have outside access to said server on account of that server being a virtual machine where the hypervisor was accessible from the VBR server, but it would be very beneficial to be able to use the VBR software to back up the server it's running on in order to back up a physical computer without using the agent software.

Is there a good way to do that, one which isn't terribly convoluted? I didn't think that was a thing, but thought I'd ask about it. If it were a thing that would be helpful as it would enable remote management to a more useful extent. The agent's remote management capability is somewhat limited.

I have also considered installing and using the agent to back up the computer and then installing the VBR server exclusively for remote management, but not actually use the VBR server to do any backups, but that seems less ideal if I could just use the VBR server for both the backups and the remote management.

[Mildur]

Hi Tim

There is no way around the Veeam Agent to protect the operating system of a physical machine.

Think about the Veeam Agent as a proxy installed on the physical machine to read data from the local hard disks and then send it to a repository. We do the same for virtual machines, just with the backup proxy component.

- Veeam Backup & Replication will be a management server (deploy, managed and monitor Veeam Agent) and can provide a backup repository
- Veeam agent will do the backup job processing

Best,
Fabian

[MarkBoothmaa]

if its a backup of the server, what about the config backup? You can use a file copy job to copy that backup to another share or shares.

[BackupBytesTim]

My inquiry was in response to Gostev's comment:

For the avoidance of doubt, Veeam Backup & Replication is that "literally one application that you use to back up everything in any scenario" you're looking for. This is your one-stop shop for protecting any single enterprise environment.

Which gave me the impression that my existing understanding of the VBR server's capabilities was inaccurate. But based on those couple of comments, I'm back to thinking I was correct, and the VBR server does not back up the computer it's installed on.

I understand I can install the Agent software as well, and hypothetically manage the Agent from the VBR server, but that's not really using the VBR server to do the backup anymore than I currently use the VSPC server to back up a few hundred customer computers right now.

Ultimately the confusion came from mentioning how different Veeam products have different features and methods of doing things, particularly in this case how the VBR server saves the snapshot of a VM, and the Agent just backs up the contents of the snapshot, but doesn't save the snapshot itself, I had mentioned different products having different features, which differs from experience I've had with other software where the features and methodologies were identical across the board because there was only 1 product being used, not different products as is Veeam's situation. Gostev's comment was (I thought) to the point of, "you can use VBR to back up everything, then you have the same features everywhere", but since you can't use VBR to backup non-VMs that doesn't seem to be accurate.

For reference that's here: post498464.html#p498464

It was getting off the original topic quite a bit, so I made a new thread here for organizational purposes.