Since Veeam Agent for Linux 4.0 (VAL) launched alongside VBR v10 earlier this year, this increasingly powerful backup agent has seen widespread adoption across various scenarios—cloud and on-premises, virtual and physical—there’s always a use case for VAL. However, we’ve found that newcomers to VAL often struggle with the agent installation process. Even with fully automated push installations, many users encounter various installation issues. This has created an awkward situation for Veeam backup software, which is renowned for its excellent user experience, making the “It just works!” slogan difficult to confidently claim.

Week 01

2020‑09‑07 – Add vCenter

2020‑09‑08 – Add VMware Windows Proxy

2020‑09‑09 – Add VMware Linux Proxy

2020‑09‑10 – Add File Proxy for NAS backups

2020‑09‑11 – Add a Windows direct-attached disk as a repository

Veeam prides itself on simplicity, yet the growing feature set can overwhelm newcomers. To help, I launched a WeChat mini-program that posts a short GIF every workday—each around ten seconds—to teach one Veeam trick at a time.

Scan the new QR code to follow:

WeChat compresses images heavily, so if you’d like the high-resolution versions, visit my blog.

When Veeam released V10 it added a brand-new capability tucked away behind PowerShell cmdlets and a rather intimidating name: Data Integration API. Many admins saw the term and assumed they’d need to write code, so they never looked deeper.

What It Actually Does

In reality, the feature is straightforward. It uses Windows’ iSCSI services to publish Veeam backup data as iSCSI disks. Think of it as a new data-lab use case: any image-level backup can be presented to a Windows or Linux host over iSCSI—no VMware or Hyper-V required. Supported sources include:

Hardening a Veeam deployment starts with a least-privilege vSphere account. As VBR adds features, the list of required rights keeps growing—check the full fine-grained permission matrix. Manually clicking through every checkbox is tedious, so here’s a slick PowerCLI script I recently found that builds the role automatically.

Prerequisite: install VMware PowerCLI. VMware’s official blog post explains the process in detail; below is the short version.

1. Install PowerShell Core 7. It’s required for PowerCLI and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. On Windows, just run the MSI installer.

Backup Copy Fundamentals

Veeam’s Backup Copy feature is the backbone of the 3-2-1 rule and has been part of VBR since day one. Conceptually it’s simple: take an existing restore point and duplicate it as a fully functional restore point in another repository. A restore point might be a single .vbk full or a chain of .vbk + .vib files—Backup Copy preserves whatever structure the source job created.

Backup Copy typically uses a forever-incremental chain. The first run produces a .vbk full; every subsequent run writes .vib increments on top of that base. Synthetic fulls are created via the GFS schedule—for example: