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Veeam Agents

For the last 18 months of being with Veeam I have been saying agent-less is best…. Why has that changed now we have an agent at Veeam? well an agent-less approach to virtualisation is an absolute must! Veeam Availability Suite were designed for those virtualised environments and bring so much more advantages by being agent-less. But for a physical and public cloud approach where Veeam have no access to the hypervisor then a requirement for an agent is a must.
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Why Agents
As I said above we do not have access to those public cloud hypervisors and I do not believe this will ever happen for security and management reasons, this meaning that some sort of an agent is required to interact with the Public Cloud architectures.From a physical point of view an agent allows for better interaction for both Server and Workstation.

Physical Workloads

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Sure the biggest news here is that Veeam now have a physical play for protecting workloads on legacy physical tin, I probably shouldn’t say legacy but there are certain vendors out there that mean it is nearly impossible to virtualise their applications without accruing a huge licensing penalty, I digress. For the past forever there are still a handful of businesses that have a physical footprint.

Public Cloud

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This is my favourite story to tell around the newly announced agents, don’t just think physical also think those nice shiny new Microsoft Azure VM instances or AWS systems you are provisioning, they need protecting too. And these agents will give that ability to manage and protect not only those physical workloads but also workloads within the public cloud.

Cloud Connect

Being able to directly backup to a Service Provider, agent to Service Provider with no middle environment to worry about.
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RAW Device Mappings

There is another use case even within a virtual environment, RDMs or Pass-through LUNs, this is something that Veeam Backup & Replication are not able to protect using the usual virtual agentless approach, installing an agent on the virtual machine with these disks attached will allow for an element of protection to those servers, however in this day and age please reach out to me if you have a good argument as to why RDMs or Pass-through LUNs are still valid within a virtualised environment.

Licensing

As with most of Veeam’s portfolio of products, at least the Windows agent started life out as Veeam EndPoint FREE, this will remain a free product but this recent announcement is going to provide end users both Workstation and Server versions which will offer different levels of functionality.This will open a door for Veeam, Resellers and End Users, now bringing the ability to protect workstation style laptops and desktops from a centrally managed location at a cost I am sure will be shared very soon by Veeam.

With the added benefits of being able to offer a Server license which will allow for enterprise level features such as application aware processing, central management including scheduling and retention options.

FREE

Everyone loves free and I wanted to talk about the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v2 FREE edition. So check this out for free you are going to able to do all things you could do previously with EndPoint FREE, the backing up to a shared folder, External HDD and a Veeam Repository.In backing up to a Veeam repository you are also going to be able to leverage “Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure” ideal for a lab version of your physical servers for patch testing whilst using the public cloud, but also this means that this Free product means for an easy Physical to Cloud conversion tool

This FREE version will also include source side encryption to protect your workloads as it leaves corporate networks. Also the ability to use Instant VM recovery to spin up your machine backup in Hyper-V instantly from your backup storage.

Workstation Edition

Different to the FREE edition there will be 24/7 technical support, central/remote configuration and management. The use case is to protect those road warriors within a company against various scenarios without impacting on their day to day work. There will also be the ability to backup direct to a Cloud Connect partner.

Server Edition

From a server edition point of view, well you get everything mentioned above but also the ability to take Application Aware consistent backups for your important Application servers, Transactional Log backup for those with Exchange and SQL. Finally, the ability to index and provide a catalogue for all guest files.
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Veeam Agent for Linux

The agent for Linux will also come in 3 different versions and you can see the differences in functionality outlined below.
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