Installing Veeam Agent for Linux

I wanted to get Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) into my lab so I have a more complete lab so I can always show off stuff as need.  It turned out to be harder to do then expected.  So an article had to be written. Most of what is below is at the command line.

So here we go!

Preparation

If you have a license, copy it to the Linux VM in a location you know.  I put mine into /root.

You will need to download an install file from Veeam (check here) but make sure it matches your platform.  Mine is CentOS 64-bit so that is what I got. Once you have that file copy it somewhere in the Linux VM - I put mine in /tmp. You can use SCP to do the copy but I use SecureFX - I have used the Windows and Mac version of this utility for many years and like it a lot.

The docs are here and here is the info on Patch 1.  You don’t have to anything about it as it will be dealt with automatically as part of the process in this article.

You need a Linux VM - in my case a CentOS v7 built using this template. And have it currently patched so use:

yum update

And restart even if you are not prompted tool.

When I did the Veeam install first time I got an error.

It is similar to one in the docs that is talked about as SLES but I do not understand what it talks about - I am not a Linux guy.

But I learned through testing that before I do the Veeam install to do these two commands.

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-10.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh epel-release-7-10.noarch.rpm

And once they are done, you are good to continue with the Veeam install.

Install

Change to the folder that you have the install file bits in.  In my case /tmp. Now execute the following commands.

rpm -ivh ./veeam-release* && yum check-update

yum install veeam

yum remove veeam veeamsnap

yum update veeam

But probably no update is found. But in a month, or year, or weeks there will be an update and that is the command that will do the update for you. The update KB article will confirm that is right for you at the time of the update.

Ready for action

Now you can do a backup.  But before that lets talk UI and having an easy to read screen.  The best I could do was using these parameters in my client - which is SecureCRT - I really think it is the best SSH type client, and I have used it on Windows and Mac for years.

This means the UI mostly looks great but in some places it doesn’t but I cannot seem to improve that. I hope to figure it out and I will update this to reflect the new info.

So lets start the UI.

veeamconfig ui

And we will be prompted for the license file.  I browsed out to mine. You can do it later if necessary or not at all if you want free.  If you license you get to choose Server or Workstation.  Server will do VSS integrated backups in the appropriate OS.

And then we see the following (albeit without a backup job yet):

You can create a job very easily. I did and pointed it to my VBR server.  I misspelled the domain of my user and got this error.

This is an example of how the screen is not perfect like the main screen.  But I reentered my domain and it worked fine.

When the job is running it looks like below.

Once the job is finished you can see it in your Veeam server.

So this is pretty cool. This Linux machine could be in the cloud, or a physical machine somewhere and now the backup for it is in my Veeam server.  So I could do things like restore to Azure, or a Backup Copy job to a Cloud Connect partner.  So nice to have options.

Update:

• 9/10/17 - had an issue on the second or third VM I installed the VAL to.  The install seemed to go fine but when doing the back up it failed and showed the error seen below. I was able to guess that this came from not doing a restart after the vum update.  So I restarted, and removed Veeam and restarted, then installed Veeam again, and now the backups worked.

• Thanks to a reader (Tryingtobe Helpful) he was able to help me fix the messy UI.  I just had to do UT-8 in Terminal / Appearance / Character encoding when in the job properties.  Worked great. BTW, the logs are in /var/log/veeam.

Have a great day,

Michael

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