vmware tool mandatory for veeambackup

[piloteight]

Hi,

windows 2003 r2 sp2 - I did not install vmware tool on this vm. Is vmware tool required to enhance veeambackup or is this optional? I am running veeam backup 5. It appears to be backing up without the vmware tool.
I got this message:

Validating guest agent availability for the VM
Unable to use guest agent: VM guest OS state is 'NotRunning'



What are the benefits of installing vmware tool and the disadvantages for veeam backup.

thanks!

Joe.

[Gostev]

Hi Joe, VMware Tools are not mandatory, but they are required to leverage application-aware processing and guest file system indexing features of our software. You can read up more about these features in the sticky FAQ topic. If you do not need these features, simply do not enable them in your backup job settings. Thanks!

[Alexey D.]

Also, VMware tools are highly recommended when using virtual labs for restore verification and U-AIR wizards.

[Thibal]

Hi,

I have read a WhitePaper which said that VmWare tools is the agent on the OS which assumes the jobs necessary to properly backup an then restore machines such as Exchange servers or ADDCs. If this is the case I would call them mandatory on these kind of machines.

[Gostev]

Hi Thi, in fact VMware Tools do NOT have a logic to properly backup said applications, at least today it does not have any application awareness built in. On the other hand, Veeam Backup itself provides this out of box ("application-aware image processing" feature).

In all cases, I highly recommend having VMware Tools installed on each and every VM.

Thanks.