Disable Veeam Distribution Service permanently?

[pufferdude]

Regarding the recent vulnerability detailed here https://www.veeam.com/kb4288 the temporary workaround until you can patch is to disable the Veeam Distribution Service.

My question is: If I'm not using Veeam agents to back up physical hosts in any way, and don't plan to, can I just leave this service disabled permanently? Or do some other parts of Veeam also rely on it?

I'm on a quest to harden my Veeam B&R primary server/repo as much as practical given our crazy ransomware climate, and having a inbound port open on the server that I will never take advantage of seems stupid... IF there are no negative consequences I'm unaware of. Thus this question.

[PetrM]

Hi Jim,

You should not face any issues after disabling Veeam Distribution Service as long as you don't use agent-based backup to protect any of your workloads.

Thanks!

[pufferdude]

Great, thanks for the sanity check!

[doktornotor]

Is there some doc about disabling services? E.g., for people who don't have any use for those cloud things (Azure, AWS, Google) - safe to disable?

[veremin]

Correct, you can disable these services completely, if you are not interested in integration with Veeam Backup for AWS, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure or Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform.

Currently we don't have any documentation that matches product-specific features with corresponding system services.

Thanks!

[DaKernel]

Hi Veremin,

We can also disable the Veeam Cloud Connect Service service as well if we are not using any of the above mentioned cloud backups? Just want to make sure so I don't muck anything up

Larry

[Gostev]

You should be fine but please note we don't test our product in such configurations (certain set of services disabled). In the worst case scenario, you can always enable it back!

[wishr]

Hi Larry,

If you are not using Cloud Connect infrastructure, you may disable this service.

Thanks

[DaKernel]

@wishr and @Gostev, Thank you both for the fast replies! Have an awesome day!

Larry