Veeam Backup & Replication 13 Windows Install

原文：Veeam Backup & Replication 13 Windows Install — theDXT (Daniel Keer)

Veeam Backup & Replication is a wonderful product that I’ve been using for years. I’ve used it many times to recovery from various situations, and it’s been a real lifesaver.

What Veeam Backup & Replication actually does

VBR (Veeam Backup & Replication) is backup software that can back up your systems, whether they are bare-metal, cloud, or VMs. VBR supports various hypervisors, including VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Proxmox, and others, and has expanded its support to include backing up raw file shares or object storage. Veeam keeps adding more and more features to VBR. VBR is part of the Veeam Data Platform.

It helps to be precise about where VBR sits in the stack. It is not an agent that lives inside a guest and ships files to the cloud; it is a management server that orchestrates backup, replication, restore and verification jobs, using data movers, proxies and repositories to move blocks from source to target. On a virtual platform VBR can use changed block tracking to read only what has changed since the last run, which is what makes daily incremental jobs practical on large estates. On physical servers it deploys a lightweight agent, and for file shares and object storage it can read directly over SMB, NFS or the S3 API.

That architecture is why storage design matters as much as server design. A repository built on a healthy, well-monitored disk array will make the difference between a backup window that finishes at 5 a.m. and one that overlaps the working day, and why we treat disk health monitoring with smartctl and smartd as a prerequisite rather than an afterthought. If your secondary copy strategy includes replication to another site or a cloud tier, our guide to ZFS send/recv snapshot replication is useful background for the receiving end of that pipeline, and object storage targets are covered in configuring an S3 object store bucket.

Editions, licensing and the community edition

VBR ships in several editions, and the one you install changes what the console will let you do. The paid editions add advanced features such as advanced replication topologies, storage integration, SOBR (scale-out backup repository) policies, and encrypted backups at rest. The community edition is free and is limited to a small number of protected workloads — around a dozen — which is usually plenty for a lab, a small office or an evaluation.

The practical consequences of the community edition are worth knowing before you start, because they explain behaviour you might otherwise mistake for a fault. The workload limit is enforced by the license engine, not by the installer, so jobs simply stop backing up new machines once the cap is reached. The web UI, covered later in this article, is also restricted in the community edition. If you are evaluating VBR for a production estate, plan the license before you build the repository layout, because changing editions later means re-validating your job topology.

In this post, I will show you step by step how to install Veeam Backup & Replication 13 on Windows.

Prerequisites

You need a server with the following.

• Windows Server 2016 or newer.
• 8 CPU cores or more.
• 16 GB RAM or more.

• 130GB disk space.

  • 5 GB for the Veeam Backup & Replication installation.
  • 4.5 GB for Microsoft .NET Framework.
  • 10 GB per 100 backed up VMs.
  • 100 GB for instant recovery cache folder.
  • 10 GB for Logs.

• Port 443 is available.

The required disk space doesn’t all have to be on the C drive. For this post, I’ll keep it on the C drive.

A few of these deserve emphasis. The 8-core, 16 GB baseline is for the management server alone and does not include the resources consumed by proxies or repositories if you place them on the same host. The disk figure is dominated by the instant recovery cache, which is a fast local scratch area used when you boot a VM directly from a backup — keep it on SSD if you plan to use that feature. Port 443 is required because the console talks to the backup service over HTTPS, and because VBR 13 now exposes a web UI on the same port.

The Process

• Mount the VBR ISO.
• Run Setup.exe.

• On the VBR 13 install splash screen, click on Install.

• Click on Install Veeam Backup & Replication.

• Wait while the setup wizard is initialized.

• If you agree to the Veeam license agreements, click on I Accept.

• Enter your Veeam license. Otherwise, the installer installs the community edition.

I will use the community edition.

• Wait while the VBR installer checks your system for any potential installation issues.

During this process, the VBR installer will install and enable any missing features.

• Decide whether to use the Veeam default installation settings, then click Install or Customize Settings.

I will use the default settings.

VBR 13 on Windows supports PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server for the configuration database. PostgreSQL is the default, but Microsoft SQL Server remains supported.

The configuration database is a detail worth understanding rather than clicking past. It stores the job definitions, the backup catalogue, credentials, and the history of every session, so it is the one component you must be able to restore if the management server itself is lost. Choosing PostgreSQL keeps the deployment self-contained, which is why it is the default; choosing Microsoft SQL Server makes sense when your organisation already operates SQL clusters with their own backup and availability regime. Whatever you choose, note down the instance details during installation, because the Veeam configuration backup job can only protect the database it is connected to.

• The installation process consists of 8 steps.
  1. Installs PostgreSQL.
  2. Installs Veeam Backup & Replication Server.
  3. Installs Veeam Backup & Replication Console.
  4. Installs Veeam Explorers.
  5. Installs Veeam Agents Redistributables.
  6. Installs Plug-ins for Veeam Backup & Replication.
  7. Applies the latest update.
  8. Finalizes the installation and starts services.

During the VBR 13 installation, you will see a few Veeam ads.

If you are installing Veeam on a slower server, you may encounter an error saying that the VeeamBackupSvc service failed to start. In my testing, clicking retry and waiting a bit typically resolves it.

• Click Finishto close the VBR 13 installation splash screen.

• Openthe Veeam Backup & Replication Console.

It’s normal for VBR to say that localhost has an untrusted certificate on a fresh install.

• Click Yesto trust the server certificate for your new VBR install.

• Click Sign in as current user.

• The VBR Windows console will begin loading.

• You will now see the VBR console.

A new feature in VBR 13 is support for dark mode.

VBR 13 now features a web UI on port 443. Access it at https://localhost/ on your VBR server.

Unfortunately, with the community edition, you can’t use the web UI.

First-run configuration after the install

Installing VBR is the easy part; the server does nothing useful until you tell it where your data lives and where copies should go. A sensible first-run sequence looks like this.

• Add the virtual infrastructure. Add your vCenter or standalone ESXi hosts, Hyper-V clusters, or Proxmox and Nutanix endpoints, so VBR can enumerate the machines you want to protect.
• Create a backup repository. Point it at the volume that will hold your backups. For a first lab, a local disk is fine, but for production use a dedicated array with monitored SMART data and enough free space for at least one full plus the retention you intend to keep.
• Register proxies and mount servers. On a small deployment the VBR server acts as its own proxy, but on larger estates you add dedicated proxies near the source and mount servers near the repository to keep data movement off the management server.
• Set the credentials and encryption password. Store the credentials used to reach the hypervisor and guests, and decide whether backups should be encrypted at rest from day one — changing that later means a full re-seed.
• Build a job and run it. Create a backup job, select a small test machine, run it, then immediately perform a file-level and a full-VM restore to confirm the chain works end to end.
• Enable configuration backup. Schedule the VBR configuration backup to a location away from the management server. This is the job that saves you if the server dies.

If your virtual platform is VMware, remember that ESXi itself also has its own configuration worth preserving separately — our walkthrough of ESXi configuration backup covers that layer, and this comparison of Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs is helpful when you are sizing the storage that VBR will read from.

Sizing the backup chain before you build it

A common mistake is to install VBR, create a job with default retention, and only discover a month later that the repository is full. Decide the chain before you press Install.

• Retention. Retention is expressed in restore points. Daily jobs with a 30-day retention and a weekly full will consume roughly one full plus 30 incrementals per workload, and the incremental size depends on how much data changes each day.
• Full backups. Synthetic fulls build a new full from the existing chain on the repository without reading the source again, which is why repository performance matters more than network speed for long-term storage.
• Immutability. If you plan to protect against ransomware by making the repository immutable, verify that the underlying filesystem or object store supports the required immutability window before the first job runs.
• Growth. Size the repository for at least twelve months of projected growth, not for today’s data, and monitor free space as an alert rather than a manual check.

Where to place the components

VBR is modular, and the same software can be a single all-in-one server or a distributed deployment. For a lab or a small office, one server running the management role, the proxy role and the repository role is perfectly reasonable. For a production estate, separate them: place proxies close to the source hypervisors so that read traffic stays inside the virtual network, and place repositories close to the storage that holds the backups. The management server itself carries little data traffic; its job is orchestration, so it belongs on a reliable, well-backed-up host rather than the fastest hardware you own.

The one component that must never live only on the management server is the configuration database. Schedule a Veeam configuration backup to a repository or a network share that survives the loss of the server, and document the restore procedure before you need it.

Troubleshooting the installation

• VeeamBackupSvc failed to start. Nearly always a timing problem on slow or heavily loaded servers. Click Retry and give it a minute; if it still fails, start the service manually from services.msc and check the Windows Application log for the underlying error.
• Port 443 already in use. Another web server, a management agent or IIS may hold the port. Identify the listener with netstat -ano | findstr :443, correlate the PID in Task Manager, and either free the port or move the conflicting service.
• System configuration check fails. The pre-flight check will name the missing feature or the insufficient resource. Let the installer enable the feature, then reboot and re-run setup.
• Not enough disk space. Re-check the 130 GB figure, remembering that the instant recovery cache is the largest single component.
• Console cannot connect. Confirm the Veeam Backup Service is running and that the certificate warning was accepted; on a fresh install the self-signed certificate is expected.

netstat -ano | findstr :443
Get-Service VeeamBackupSvc

Summary

That’s all it takes to install Veeam Backup & Replication 13 on Windows.

If you want to read more about installing Veeam Backup and Replication, here is the Veeam documentation.

If you want to learn more about the community edition, here is the Veeam page about it.