Before You Begin

Before creating a protection group, consider the following prerequisites and limitations:

  • [Not applicable to protection groups for pre-installed Veeam Agents] When Veeam Backup & Replication performs discovery of protected computers, Veeam Backup & Replication connects to every computer added to the protection group. If you instruct Veeam Backup & Replication to perform discovery immediately after the protection group is created, make sure that all computers added to the protection group are powered on and may be accessed over the network. Otherwise, Veeam Backup & Replication will be unable to connect to a protected computer and perform the required operations on this computer.
  • A protection group for pre-installed Veeam Agents is the only protection group that allows to protect the following objects:
    • [In Veeam Backup & Replication version 12.0] Unix machines and Mac computers with pre-installed Veeam Agent
    • [Starting from Veeam Backup & Replication version 12.1] Mac computers with pre-installed Veeam Agent and Linux computers with pre-installed nosnap version of Veeam Agent (including Veeam Agent for Linux on Power)
  • A protection group for pre-installed Veeam Agents offers a limited set of deployment and management operations. To learn more, see Working with Protection Groups for Pre-Installed Veeam Agents and Managing Protected Computers Added to Protection Group for Pre-Installed Veeam Agents.
  • A protection group that includes Microsoft Active Directory objects can include objects from one domain only. To add to the inventory computers that reside in another domain, you need to create a separate protection group and include in this protection group the necessary objects from that domain.
  • Veeam Backup & Replication automatically excludes from the protection scope Active Directory objects of the Group type that exist in a parent Active Directory object (organizational unit, container or entire domain) specified in the protection group settings. To instruct Veeam Backup & Replication to process a group, you must select this group explicitly in the protection group settings.
  • You cannot add or exclude universal and domain local groups to/from protection groups that include Microsoft Active Directory objects. Only global groups are supported.
  • A protection group for cloud machines can include only the following objects:
    • Amazon EC2 instances
    • Microsoft Azure virtual machines
  • A protection group for cloud machines can include objects running only supported Microsoft Windows and Linux OSes.
  • Amazon EC2 instances included in the protection group for cloud machines must meet the following requirements:
    • Instances must have SSM Agent installed and running. To learn more, see this Amazon article.
    • Instances must have access to CRL lists and certificates of the AWS internal services necessary to connect to these internal services.
  • Microsoft Azure virtual machines included in the protection group for cloud machines must meet the following requirements:
    • Virtual machines must have Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Agent (Azure VM Agent) installed and running. To learn more, see this Microsoft article.
    • Virtual machines must have access to CRL lists and certificates of the Microsoft Azure internal services necessary to connect to these internal services.

Note that in client Microsoft Windows OSes access to the administrative share is forbidden by default for local accounts. You can enable this option with a registry key. To learn more, see this Microsoft KB article.

  • Veeam Backup & Replication does not support usage of a Linux account for which system settings modify shell output results to connect to a computer included in the protection group. For example, this includes Linux accounts with the modified PS1 shell variable.
  • Each time you add a Veeam Agent computer to the protection group, Veeam Backup & Replication considers this Veeam Agent computer as a new object. For example, if you add a Veeam Agent computer to the protection group, then remove this Veeam Agent computer from the protection group and add to the same protection group again, Veeam Backup & Replication will consider this Veeam Agent computer as two different objects. As a result, Veeam Agent will start a new backup chain each time you add the Veeam Agent computer to the protection group.
  • To connect to the Linux-based computer where you want to install Veeam Agent for Linux, you must specify the user account that has a home directory. The specified user account must also have the read and write permissions for their home directory.
  • You cannot install Veeam Agent for Linux on the server used as a hardened repository.