Creating Custom Veeam Recovery Media

In addition to the generic Veeam Recovery Media that is available for download at the Veeam website, you can create a custom Veeam Recovery Media. This option may be helpful if your computer uses hardware that requires drivers not included in the generic Veeam Recovery Media. When you create a custom Veeam Recovery Media, Veeam Agent updates the generic Veeam Recovery Media: copies the Linux kernel running on your computer with its currently loaded modules and includes them into the custom recovery image.

Prerequisite Software Requirements

Before you create custom Veeam Recovery Media, check the following prerequisites:

The Linux system must have the genisoimage package installed. For openSUSE and SLES 15 SP1 – 15 SP6 distributions, the Linux system must have the mkisofs package installed.
The Linux system must have the mksquashfs and unsquashfs utilities installed.
For custom Veeam Recovery Media with EFI support, the Linux system must have the following packages installed:

xorriso
isolinux (or syslinux, if the software package repository of your Linux distribution lacks the isolinux package)

For the scenario where you create a custom Veeam Recovery Media using the Download and patch ISO option, the Linux system must have the wget utilitiy installed.

Considerations and Limitations

Before you create custom Veeam Recovery Media, consider the following:

The custom recovery image contains an unsigned Linux kernel. As a result, you cannot use it for UEFI systems with Secure Boot enabled.
If you plan to use live patching to create a custom Veeam Recovery Media, consider the following limitations.
You cannot create a custom Veeam Recovery Media for Veeam Agent computers that run Linux kernel version earlier than 3.10. For a workaround, see this Veeam KB article.
You cannot create a custom Veeam Recovery Media for Veeam Agent computers running on IBM Power Systems.

Creating Custom Veeam Recovery Media

You can create a custom Veeam Recovery Media in one of the following ways:

With the Veeam Agent control panel. You can perform this operation in the following conditions:

During the process of initial product setup, at the Recovery ISO step of the initial setup wizard.
Any time you need, in the Miscellaneous menu. For details, see Creating Custom Veeam Recovery Media with Control Panel.

With the Veeam Agent command line interface. For details, see Creating Custom Veeam Recovery Media with Command Line Interface.

If you create a custom Veeam Recovery Media using the command line interface, you can also specify a directory that contains additional drivers that you want to include in the recovery media.