Category Archives: Veeam Agent for Windows

The VeeamVanguard and Microsoft MVP Community is about more than the vendor programs

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Introduction

I have been a Microsoft MVP and a Veeam Vanguard for quite some time now, which suggests that I share experiences, insights, knowledge, and feedback with the global IT community at large.

Community activities are as diverse as their members and their personalities. But in most cases, these activities involve adding something to the community they are part of. It is, or should not be, about what’s in it for me, even when that community will rise to help you should the need arise, but about us all. We all trip and fall at certain moments in our lives, both personally and professionally, meaning we all need help at times.

Helping those who need some assistance

One of the things I do is help where and when I can to ensure that the senior citizens I know or am aware of have their connectivity needs met as well as possible. That is particularly important for them if they rely on personal care and alarm systems, as well as some basic home automation, which makes living at home not only easier but also possible.

I don’t do such things through a non-profit organization; it’s simply a matter of rising to the occasion when the need and opportunity present themselves. Recently, a little “project” presented itself that required some network gear to complete.

Anyway, there was a need for excellent connectivity and a decent backup of any critical system(s). So, I offer my skills and time. I have some spare lab parts, but not all the items I need. This project required some wireless access points that can be easily and correctly configured and managed. So, what does one do? Ask for help from companies that might have surplus gear after hardware refreshes. I have used Aruba (IAP versions) and UniFi in the past. Any kit that works without expensive, high-end controller requirements and continues to function without requiring support contracts does the job. In some instances, flashing proprietary hardware with OpenWrt helps leverage hardware that does not work or cannot be maintained without a subscription.

For this project, I acquired some donated TP-Link Omada gear that was perfect for the job at hand.

What also came in handy is the community edition or free software from Veeam, which is available without subscriptions or costs, provided it is not installed by consultants or for profit. Hence, I give some schooling and training to ensure that the most tech-savvy person can take care of it. I help, explain, and offer advice on some aspects, but they ultimately get the job done.

I also needed a gateway/router/firewall. While in this case, I might consider installing a TP-Link gateway if I ever get my hands on one, but for now, an older model proprietary firewall I recovered and flashed with OPNsense Community Edition fills that role.

Preaching

We live in a polarized world, where division hinders progress. Social media bombards us with a tsunami of bad news that can keep you doomscrolling 24/7 if you fall into that trap. Instead, apply your skills to do something that improves the lives of people who need some assistance. It doesn’t have to be big in terms of size or money. It does not have to make the news or require Herculean effort.

All it takes is some effort and some time on your part, but it can also be fun to do. Did I do this alone? The people themselves got involved; the business I asked to donate hardware delivered the gear. The cabling came from dumpster diving. The firewall is an “obsolete” proprietary firewall appliance flashed with OPNsense community edition. Is the setup perfect? Nope, but it is excellent and does a fantastic job, way better than ever before!

You also have some skills, time, or materials to help out people. Just do it.

Veeam Community Editions and the EULA

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Veeam Community Editions and the EULA

Boring as it might be, reading your End User License Agreements can be useful. That is no different for the Veeam Community Editions and the Veeam EULA. The EULA came up recently when discussing Veeam services an IT Service business can offer to its clients.

For example, take a look at the Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition. See the Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition for more information. It is a great resource and was written by Kirsten Stoner.

Veeam Community Editions and the EULA
The Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

It includes support for up to 10 Instance licenses and allows you to protect any combination of physical machines, virtual machines, and cloud workloads for free. You get the standard edition backup functionality. Veeam also offers community editions of Veeam ONE™ and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. Cool!

The value for you

This is an awesome offering. It helps people with small environments and small budgets out big time. They get top-notch data protection for free, Not just that, they get all the goodness of the well known Veeam data portability, ease of recovery, reliability, and support. Then there are the forums, where you’ll find many helpful and skilled eyes. It is a very active community.

The value for Veeam

First of all, Veeam is smart. They put their products into as many hands as possible. When that happens people get to use, learn, know, and love the products. That leads to sales when 10 instances just don’t cut it anymore. It also leads to a lot of feedback and insights. A lot of the people using it are early adopters and IT professionals. This means that they use the products and if they find issues Veeam gets telemetry and early insights to potential bugs. This helps them deal with then proactively before the big enterprises upgrade as that usually takes a bit longer.

Secondly, Veeam is community-minded. And that is not just lip service, they act on it. I know this first hand and you will to when you experience it. The community editions of their products are just one example of that.

As mentioned, you get support. Within reason, just like with paid support the Veeam support engineers will not do implementations for you. So just doing “click, click next” like a baffling buffoon won’t get you far. Support is not meant to replace your own skills or provide free IT designs and implementations. That work is for you. The support with the community editions is about finding and fixing issues with the product. That’s very valuable for Veeam as early adopters who run into issues help surface those in time to address for the slower moving customers.

Do It Yourself

The Veeam Community Editions EULA boils down to the fact that it is a Do It Yourself (DIY) arrangement.

As a hobbyist, student, enthusiast, employee who wants to learn more about Veeam products or leverage them to protect a company or non-profit workloads you can do that up to the 10 free licenses. It is perfectly legal to do so. But as it is DIY, you cannot hire someone to do this for you. Likewise as an IT consultant. contractor or freelancer, solo or with a company, you cannot offer paid services around Community Edition. For that, they have different licensing options. You can read up on this in the EULA.

Conclusion

The rules around Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition are simple. As an end-user (hobbyist, employee, business) you get most of the famous Veeam capabilities and benefits for free up to 10 instances. Yes, you can use this in production and you get free basic support from Veeam. Then there are the forums, which offer a wealth of insights and where many helpful eyes can assist you. For this to be legal you have to implement and maintain the community editions yourself. You cannot hire people to do it for you. As an IT service company, no matter what the size or nature, you cannot offer commercial services and build a business model around the Veeam Community Editions. That’s what the commercial versions and partnerships are for. As far as EULA’s go, that is crystal clear.

CBT DRIVER WITH Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.1

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Change Block Tracking comes to physical & IAAS Veeam Backups

With the big improvements and new capabilities delivered in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 there are some interesting capabilities and features related specifically to the Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 Server Edition. We now get the ability to manage the Veeam Agent centrally from within VBR 9.5 UP3 console or PowerShell. This includes deploying the new Change Block Tracking (CBT) driver for Windows Server (not Linux).

This CBT driver is optional and works like you have come to expect from Veeam VBR when backing up Hyper-V virtual machines pre-Windows Server 2016. Windows Server 2016 now has its own CBT capabilities that Veeam VBR 9.5 leveraged. The big thing here is that you now get CBT capabilities for physical or virtual in guest workloads (that includes IAAS people!) with Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 Server Edition.

Deploying the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.1 CBT Driver

The Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 ships with an optional, signed change block tracking filter driver for Windows servers. That agent is included in your VBR 9.5 Update 3 download or you can choose to download an update that does not have the CBT driver included. That’s up to you. I just upgraded my lab and production environment with the agent included as I might have a use for them. If not now, then later and at least my environment is ready for that.

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When you have installed VAW 2.1 you can navigate to C:\Program Files\Veeam\Endpoint Backup\CBTDriver and find the driver files there for the supported Windows Server OS versions under their respective folders.

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As you can see in the screenshot above we have CBT drivers for any version of Windows Server back to Windows Server 2008 R2. If you are running anything older we really need to talk about your environment in 2018. I mean it.

Note that right clicking the .inf file for your version of Windows Server and selecting Install is the most manual way of installing the CBT driver. You’ll need to reboot the host.

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Normally you’ll either integrate the deployment and updating of the CBT driver into the VBR 9.5 Update 3 console or you’ll deploy and update the CBT driver manually.

Install / uninstall the CBT driver via Veeam Backup & Replication Console

You can add servers individually or as part of a protection group (Active Directory based). Whatever option you chose you’ll have the option of managing them via the agent manually or via VBR server. Once you have done that you can deploy and update the optional CBT driver for supported Windows Server versions via the individual servers or the protection groups.

Individual Server

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Once the agent is installed you’ll can optionally install the CBT driver. When that’s you can also uninstall the CBIT driver and the agent form the VBR Console.

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Protection Group

You can add servers to protect via VAW 2.1 individually, via active directory (domain, organizational unit, container, computer, cluster or a group) or a CSV file with server names /IP-addresses. That’s another subject actually but you get the gist of what a protection group is.

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Checking the CBT driver version

You can always check the CBT driver version via the details of a server added to the physical or cloud infrastructure.

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Install / uninstall the CBT driver via the standalone Veeam Agent for Windows

My workstation at home isn’t managed by a Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 Update 3 server. It’s a standalone system. But it does run Windows Server 2016. Now, even while such a standalone system can send its backups to Veeam Repository, I don’t do that at home. The target is a local disk in disk bay that I can easily swap out every week. I just rotate through a couple of recuperated larger HDDs for this purpose and this also allows me to take a backup copy off site. The Veeam Agent for Windows configuration for my home office workstation is done locally, including the installation of the CBT driver. Doing so is easy. Under settings in the we now have a 3rd entry VAW 2.1 that’s there to install the CBT driver if we want to.

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When you click install it will be done before you can even blink. It will prompt you the restart the computer to finish installing the driver. Do so. If not, the next backup will complain about failing over to MFT analysis based incremental backups as you can’t use the installed CBT driver yet.

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When using the new VAW 2.1 CBT drivers for windows changes get tracked a VCT file. These can be seen under C:\ProgramData\Veeam\EndpointData\CtStore\VctStore.

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Ready to Go

I’ll compare the results of backing up my main workhorse with and without the CBT driver installed. Veeam indicates the use case is for servers with a lot of data churn and that’s where you should use them. The idea is that you don’t need to deal with updating the drivers when the benefits are not there. That’s fair enough I’d say but I’m going to experiment a little with them anyway to see what difference I can notice without resorting to a microscope.

If we conclude that having the CBT driver installed is not worth while for our workstation we can easily uninstall it again via the control panel, under settings, where we now see the option to uninstall it. Easy enough.

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However, as it can track changes in NTFS as well as ReFS and FAT partitions it might be wise to use it for those servers that have one or more of such volumes, even when for NFTS volumes the speed difference isn’t that significant. Normally the bigger the data churn delta the bigger the benefits of the CBT driver will be.