Veeam Agent for Linux [EOL] Reviews

I'm a pre-sales engineer, so I'm basically supporting our partner. We're an IT distributor. There are many inquiries these days looking for backup solutions for Linux, so we made it for Linux. This tool already uses Linux, instead of a backup administrator needing manual workloads to backup the Linux machine. You can deploy this agent remotely, from a backup server. You just have to enable flash and pull and check the compatibility of Linux with big machines and you can remotely deploy it and start backing up in no time. 

Our backup is pretty plain and simple. We can back up the entire machine so that you can be able to restore from bare metal in case of loss of the entire machine. You have the option also to restore single files, including backup of the Oracle database. It supports a wide range of Linux distributions but because Linux is an entire world on its own, with many distributions and cable versions, there will always be some Linux distribution with kernel versions that are not supported. However, there is a big, diverse sets of Linux kernel versions that are supported.

I used both deployment models, the stand-alone mode model and the one deployed from the backup server.

The product has drastically improved. Veeam never used to have any Agents, whether for Linux or Windows. They were strictly focusing on virtual environments. Even within virtual environments, they were strictly focused on Hyper-V VMware. Now, however, with the addition of agents, it helps a lot. Many environments, due to constraints with the received design or performance, prefer to go with certain workloads to be physical. Now the trend in Saudi Arabia is to migrate workloads to Linux since they somehow think it's more secure, although that's a debatable argument. There are also a lot of Oracle databases being deployed on Linux nowadays, so it does come of value there.

The really amazing feature about Veeam Agent is that when you're using the central deployment model, you can actually use the instant VM recovery feature, which is really a pain point that I find some days. Here in Saudi Arabia, the market mentality is a bit different. Many customers are still running physical environments. They do not have virtual environments and they're not really keen towards going towards the virtual environment.

They always want to back up their systems every day. In the event of a disaster, they want to be able to restore in less than an hour, which is impossible on a physical environment, due to a lot of constraints, such as networking and other issues. However, Windows gives a feature that if you have a Hyper-V environment, for example, added to the Veeam backup infrastructure, you can choose to restore a backup of a physical server instantly into Hyper-V. The way that works is that they mount the backup to the Hyper-V as storage and just boot it up directly from the backup. That is an amazing feature, and it actually was useful for one customer, whose IT manager was pretty old. He didn't want to migrate his infrastructure to VMware or any virtualized platforms. He was looking for a way to backup these physical servers and at the event, he has a disaster, he'll be able to restore in time.

So that feature doesn't just help with restoring that server in no time inside a Hyper-V server or cluster. It also helps migration for customers who are trying to migrate from physical to virtual or from physical to cloud. The good part is that you can actually restore any backup to Microsoft Azure as well, or to Amazon AWS, almost instantaneously. As long as your bandwidth is sufficient enough, you can restore your workloads to the cloud or to a virtual environment.

That is not to mention the flexibility provided, as it gives you the ability to perform the three to one rule, which is the really necessary part of any backup solution. Being able to have a solution that will help you achieve the three to one rule. The rule basically means having three different backup copies of your data, inside two different mediums. For example, one disc-based storage and one tape or cloud, keeping one copy offsite. I prefer offline because offline backups are the latest backups in terms of a cyber attack, ransomware, or advanced malware attack.

It would be much better if more applications were supported on the Linux side. For example, their agent for Windows not only can back up the Windows machine, but it can also back up Active Directory for granular restore, SQL servers, Exchange, Oracle, SharePoint, etc. When it comes to Linux, only Oracle databases are supported. There are workarounds, though. There are other ways to perform application consistency or transaction consistent backups. For example, you can configure having a backup job to run a script to save the laws of the database and store them on specific storage. So more applications support would definitely be of great value because not everyone is using Oracle. Some people are using MySQL or MongoDB and they would like to see a plug and play native integration built into the tool as well.  There are plenty of applications in the market these days that are becoming mainstream. People are not only using vendor projects, but they may also use open source projects, which are gaining a lot of popularity.

It's really important to note that Veeam Agents for Linux is the software that is installed inside the Linux machines, but Veeam Agent integrates with Veeam Backup Server. Backup Server is pretty scalable, but as for the Agents part, I can only tell you about the components that are related to the agent. The main components of Veeam are: Veeam Backup Server, Veeam Repository, Veeam Distribution Server, and Veeam Agents. Agents are going to be deployed on the clients. The Distribution Server is responsible for deploying Agents and monitoring them. The Repository is where you store your backups. Finally, the Backup Server is basically the big brain, so you can distribute and deploy as much of these components as you want across an environment. The distribution architecture is pretty scalable.

We'd like to see native support for clusters in Veeam, as well as other agents for Linux. For example, Microsoft has support for its clusters, which is amazing. There are many people that like Microsoft and really like their clusters, so they want to be able to have their backup solution to be clustered aware. Veeam Agent for Linux has no specific cluster support, however, it still can be used to backup Linux clusters. There is no native support as there is with Veeam Agents for Windows and Microsoft failover cluster support.

It's as simple as just opening a support ticket online and calling the toll free number. An engineer engaged remotely within five to ten minutes. They're really responsive and very supportive when it comes to support. Somehow, they love to achieve a higher customer satisfaction rate. Support is a big deal for them.

I'll try not to be as biased as possible regarding Unitrends and Arcserve.

These are backup vendors that have been in the physical backup industry for quite some time. Unitrends has wide Linux distribution and cabinet supports like Veeam, but it goes way too far with Unitrends. It goes even to legacy systems, which Veeam is currently releasing software that supports. With Unitrends, you can back up a Windows NT or a really old Linux machine, but Veeam it's only the most mainstream Linux distributions that are supported. For that and for the physical part, I can say that they are improving drastically. They're on the way, but when it comes to all the legacy systems and cross-platform support, they're a bit backward, compared to other vendors. Veeam started in 2006 as a company, I believe, and the agents were first released in 2015. Still, the pace that they're growing at is pretty fast. It's faster than the other vendors were, but when it comes to physical support, all of these other vendors were much younger, so they've had this experience way before.

The initial setup was really straightforward and easy. Veeam solutions, in general, are really easy to configure and deploy and they have amazing after-sales support. Veeam can be a nightmare, however, when people are trying to size and design a solution. It's not exactly a nightmare, but it's the phase that is really important and everybody puts an emphasis on. So long as that phase is done correctly, everything should be good to go. Basically, make sure to check compatibility and be sure that the solution is going to fit the customer's required needs. So long as that has been clear from the start, there's no cost to the solution whatsoever.

The time I dealt with Veeam Agent, I tried it in a home lab. At that time, it was pretty new to me. However, when I looked at the installation guide online, which is elaborated thoroughly, I basically installed the Windows machine in which I installed the Veeam Backup Server. I already had a Linux machine, for which I enabled the SSH. I went back to the Backup Server and simply added the IP address and the root account of the machine. Then all of a sudden the agent was already deployed without even a reboot and I managed to do the backup. All of that happened in less than an hour and a half from installing the Backup Server to deploying the Agent to performing the actual backup.

You should try it out to see it for yourself. It's really easy and straightforward.

The maintenance needed for Agent for Linux at our company would be hard to quantify, but it's a huge number because we deal with resellers and systems integrators that deal with end-users. We're not talking about less than 1,000 agents.

It's a subscription-based license, which is started on a yearly basis.

Currently, the licensing is split between three editions: standard, enterprise, and enterprise plus. As long as you check the comparison between the additions and make sure that you have what you need, there are no extra costs with Veeam. You can have Veeam Agent for Linux installed and start doing backups locally, to the cloud, or to tape. There are plenty of options available.

Veeam provides the software solution, as does Arcserve and Unitrends. However, for the most part, they pitch their backup appliances. Some people may prefer to go with a backup appliance. Others may prefer a software solution. The main reason why people go with Veeam is because of its ease of use and configuration. It just works. Veeam is much easier to use and configure than a software solution that can run on your existing infrastructure. This is better than having to buy all the backup appliances and be tied to that appliance. When it fills up, you need to go buy another appliance, which is not exactly a scalable solution.

Check the compatibility, in detail. Generally speaking, there are many distributions and kernel versions supported, but it's important to be very picky about the kernel and distribution version that they are running. First, to check the agent that's compatible with them or not. For example, the most known Linux distribution is Red Hat. There have been many releases of Red Hat, many of which are being used in production. Right now, there is a version from Red Hat 5 through Red Hat 8, which I think is the latest. At the moment, I think Veeam supports 6 to 7.5 and it had 8 which is a new release, but still not supported. I imagine it will be supported very soon. However, many people are using Red Hat 5 and that's not supported yet.

In addition, make sure you plan your backups in general. This is not just tied to Veeam Agent for Linux, but tied to any backup solution. You need to know what kind of expectations you are looking for. Some people already have their backup strategy planned and want to backup their server every day and keep a retention policy of one month, for example. Because Veeam is a software solution and works with almost any storage, they come into the situation where they don't know how much storage they need. So they just make some assumptions instead of properly sizing it and they get the backup storage. Either it exceeds what they need, which is okay, or it's lower than what they need and they run into an issue at the end of the month, where the backups are failing because the storage is too full. This is the situation with any backup solution.

It's also really important to set up the antivirus and anti-malware exceptions and firewall ports. If you know about them before deployment, set up the exceptions for the firewall port and anti-malware, then you won't have any issues to worry about during deployment.

I'll give this a nine out of ten because it's really easy and straightforward. I haven't faced any issues with it yet to this day and I've done many proof of concepts and demos for clients. Veeam Agent for Linux works like a charm and after-sales support is amazing, so I can only say that the product is very new. If there is room for improvement, that would be specifically with application support, instead of just supporting Oracle databases. They should be more open to supporting other open-source AWS backups as well, however that can be done. In the backup job, you have the option either to specify your application work processing to backup Oracle databases or to use a script. This basically means whoever is administering the database can provide a script that Veeam will execute before running the backup, after running the backup, or freezing the database so that when the backup is taken the database is in a consistent state.

We use this solution for our Linux backup.

This solution provides us with an RPO within fifteen minutes, which is unlike any other product. I would estimate this as a fifty percent improvement.

The ASM backup features are the most valuable. Some other backup solutions take ASM, and when you restore it, sometimes there are some missing files.

The solution has to line up with Red Hat so that they can improve their agents as well. If they are not tied up with the RHCE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they will not be able to identify what the new features of Red Hat are.

In new releases, I hope they can support Oracle cloud. Right now they support Azure and Amazon Web Services.

This solution is pretty stable.

The scalability is great, it's perfect.

Currently, it's maximized one hundred percent. So, we are planning to grow.

We haven't opened a case with Veeam. We are trained, all of us. So, we don't open cases, but if we're going to upgrade, we will open a case. But there is no instance that we have opened a case based on the usage so far.

I have a team of five that are trained. So, that's more than enough for me. I haven't called technical support for the past, probably two years.

We have used EMC NetWorker before, but there were a lot of complexities. We had to be trained on EMC NetWorker and Avamar.

Then the Veeam Agent for Linux came. I had the Veeam Availability Suite, so I added it to my solution. We added several of our Red Hat mail servers, and it worked. In one balanced solution, one single management pane, I can take care of everything, even my cloud infrastructure.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The Veeam Backup and Replication Suite is very user-friendly. It's not like EMC NetWorker, where you have to go to the console and then do a lot of things. For Veeam, I have one single thing. There's a single management console and I can do everything from there. 

I handle the maintenance of this solution myself. With the Veeam one-monitoring solution, if my load balancer fails, my repositories have problems, the storage space is getting low, or there is a warning on the backup, then the Veeam monitor will send me an email. These types of issues can be resolved by a single system administrator.

We implemented the solution ourselves, with the help of Veeam in Cameroon.

The solution isn't expensive, not really. It's manageable.

There are some roadblocks with the licensing. Right now we are dealing with an issue because we cannot merge licenses. We can no longer install the license file. We have to merge all the license files in one file, and then install it in the license management server. This is the only issue that we having a problem with right now.

Veeam is trying to resolve it by upgrading some of our licenses. Previously, we had an agent called physical Linux. We had a Windows agent for physical workloads. You can apply the licenses for VMware, for the Linux agent, the Windows agent, etc., but no longer. All of the physical workloads have to be converted to VAS. 

Licensing costs are $300,000 USD yearly, and we pay for three years at a time. I think if you want to extend your support, you have to pay twenty-five percent of the license cost per year. We have to pay this because if there is an upgrade of the software, we cannot take advantage of that. So, you have to pay for that too.

We did not evaluate any other options.

In HMG Hospitals, for example, we have seven data centers here. We have a main and a DR. In our backup strategy, we start by backing up our main site, and then the DR, and then the other branches. We have Veeam backup and replication on all sites, but we are managing all of them from one single place. That is our backup strategy, and everything has been taken care of. We have a primary, we have a base of the domain, our secondary back up, and then our third copy backup will be on tape.

You can implement the Veeam agent for Linux if you have the Veeam Availability Suite. Otherwise, you are just wasting money. You have to understand the concept of the solution, not only the agent. There are multiple explorers which are free on the backup licenses. You have Oracle explorer, you have Exchange, you have Active Directory Explorer, you have SharePoint, etc. Not all is done by the agent. The agent doesn't matter so much. Veeam will work across the cloud environment.

Currently, ninety-five percent of my data has been backed up using this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine and a half out of ten.

We use this solution for disaster recovery and backups.

We are resellers and customizers.

I like the incremental backups and their failover.

It's very secure, it protects against ransomware.

I have been using this solution for less than a year. It has been for a very short period of time.

It's quite stable.

It's scalable. If you want more licenses, you can just add on to it. It's quite easy.

Technical support is okay. They could be more customer-friendly.

The installation is quite easy.

Price-wise it's good.

You have to pay for licenses at the enterprise level.

They have many different pricing models.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate Veeam Agent for Linux a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to backup our server.

Before we were using Veeam Agent for Linux, we didn't have a backup solution for recovery when our server potentially got damaged. This ensures we have a backup should something go wrong.

The server deployment is easy. It's quite simple to install.

The product is easy to use when you compare it to other products. The solution has proven itself to be very user-friendly.

Veeam Agent for Windows is also very good.

The solution is very stable.

Technical support is pretty good. They are quite helpful when we have queries.

The initial setup and deployment are easy. It's straightforward.

The solution is pretty stable right now, however, we believe that the solution could be made to be even more stable.

We've been using the solution for two or three years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution has been stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable in terms of its performance. We're happy with it in that regard. That said, we hope that in the future, they continue to make the stability even stronger.

The product's function is not meant to be scalable.

We have ten customers on the solution currently.

We do plan to continue to use the product.

We've dealt with technical support in the past and it has been great. We have no complaints. They are very quick to respond. We find them quite helpful. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

The solution is not overly complex or difficult when it comes to the initial setup. We found it to be relatively straightforward. The deployment process was very easy.

This is a cloud-based solution, and as such, we are always using the latest version of the solution. It is automatically updated as required.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've found the product to be very useful and has very good capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

Currently, we have an SAP server that is doing the snapshot. We use Veeam Agent to avoid the snapshot from freezing on the server.

The most valuable feature is the ability to pick up individual files.

The integration needs improvement. It should be easier for my admins.

We have used Veeam for 10 years and added Veeam Agent for Linux recently because we had a need for it.

We started using this solution a couple of months ago.

We are using the latest version.

The stability is pretty good. We are satisfied.

We have a new project that is coming up in the next couple of months with 100 servers with agents. It will be very good.

We are in France, Vietnam, Mauritius, Canada, and Hong Kong. Globally, we have 800 users.

We are very satisfied with Veeam's technical support.

My colleagues have installed the agent on the server. After that, we chose to deploy the agent from the Veeam VBR server, which is more practical for use and more available.

I am a part of a team with 50 people who deploy and maintain this solution.

Licensing costs are monthly.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Veeam Agent for Linux an eight out of ten.

We sell the latest version of Veeam Agent for Linux. 

It's simple to use.

There isn't much to improve. They just need to follow the trend or the development of other Linux products. Follow in terms of making the product compatible with new versions of Linux. They just need to include as many versions for Linux as possible.

It depends on the customer, but we have been using Veeam Agent for Linux for some years now, and we have no problem.

It's stable. You just have to deploy the updates regularly, and that's it.

I don't have direct experience but one of our customers had. He was quite positively surprised. He opened a support case with level 3, which means it's not so urgent. After a few days, when there was no response for him, he opened a new case with level 1. Then they called him straight away and solved the problem.

The initial setup is straight forward. It's simple to install, but then you have to configure it. There are always some specific situations to be considered and put into the plan and then accordingly, consider the solution.

The deployment depends on the configuration, that is, whether you have big environments or small environments. If you have just a few servers, then deployment takes two to three hours altogether, but if you have a big environment, then it takes a couple of days.

If you have a Linux environment and you need to protect it via an agent, that's when you have to use it. Otherwise, you just don't use it. You back up this little machine without initiation.

It is very good, and it fits the purpose. That's a 10 out of 10.

The most valuable feature is the instant restore option.

We are currently waiting for the continuous backup process.

The continuous backup process is not applied to Veeam.

Veeam must have a good solution for physical backup. On the Linux side, it is using an NFS folder sharing for files, but there are some security difficulties when using NFS, so we have issues using Linux file restore.

This solution is stable.

This solution easy enough to scale.

System administrators only use Veeam with one backup administrator.

We are satisfied with technical support.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward.

The deployment model is on a private cloud.

The pricing is fair and comparable with other backup solutions.

If the production site has physical computers they will not be able to use Veeam, but if they have virtual machines then it’s very good to manage, install, and the reporting is also very good.

We do not have a business relationship with Veeam, we are customers.

I am certified with Veeam.

At the moment, this solution is not good enough.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for backup and recovery.

The most valuable feature is that I can restore single files.

The user interface is good.

I would like to be able to install Veeam directly to Linux instead of having to go through a Windows server.

If I can make the VBR (Veeam Backup Replication) a proxy on Linux instead of Windows it would be an improvement in regards to security.

Also, I would like to see Veeam take a backup for shares. If they can take backups from storage then they should be able to backup up for just shares.

This solution is stable.

I haven't been using it heavily in the four months that I have been using this solution, but so far I would say that it stable.

I haven't tried to scale this solution yet, but I would say that it is easy.

I have not contacted technical support yet.

I have only had one issue but I was able to solve it.

The initial setup was straightforward, not difficult.

The documentation available is good.

I did not implement this solution through a vendor, I implemented it myself for a medium-sized company.

I haven't explored all of what this solution has to offer as I have only been using it for four months, but so far it's good and I would recommend it.

In the next release, I would like to see Veeam installed in Linux instead of Windows, that is the main concern for me. Some locations avoid using Veeam because of this, being installed on a Windows Server and not Linux. This would be a huge improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.