System Requirements

Hardware

CPU: x86-64 processor.

Memory: 2 GB RAM or more. Memory consumption varies depending on number and size of processed disks.

Disk Space: 200 MB for product installation.

Network: 1 Mbps or faster1.

System firmware: BIOS or UEFI.

Drive encryption: Microsoft BitLocker (optional)2.

1 High latency and reasonably unstable WAN links are supported.

2 BitLocker encrypted volumes must be unlocked at the moment when Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows starts the backup or restore operation. Only Microsoft BitLocker is supported for drive encryption. Other drive encryption products are not supported.

OS

Both 64-bit and 32-bit (where applicable) versions of the following operating systems are supported1,2:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2019
• Microsoft Windows Server 2016
• Microsoft Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel (including version 2004)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP13
• Microsoft Windows 10 (starting from version 1607 up to version 2004)4
• Microsoft Windows 8.1
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1

Each Veeam Agent computer that consumes a license installed in Veeam Backup & Replication must have a unique BIOS UUID.

1 Running Veeam Agent on Insider versions of Microsoft Windows OS (both Client and Server) is not supported.

2 Server Core installations of Microsoft Windows Server OSes can be backed-up only by Veeam Agent backup jobs managed by the Veeam backup server.

3 Veeam CBT driver is supported only if Microsoft Windows update KB3033929 is installed on the Veeam Agent computer.

4 Microsoft Windows 10 Education is supported starting from build 10586 and later.

File System

Microsoft Windows FAT, NTFS, ReFS file systems are supported.

The supported file system must reside on a volume that is 64 TB or smaller, because Veeam Agent uses the Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider to create a volume shadow copy during the backup. To learn more about the limitation, see this Microsoft article.

Microsoft SQL Database

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP4 Express LocalDB Edition.  

Microsoft SQL Server is installed within the Veeam Agent deployment process only if you added the target computer to the backup policy. To learn more, see Backup Policy.

Software

The following required 3rd party software is included in the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows Redistributable. During the Veeam Agent deployment process, Veeam Backup & Replication checks whether all prerequisite software is available on the target computer. If some of the required software components are missing, Veeam Backup & Replication will install missing software automatically.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Management Objects1
• Microsoft SQL Server System CLR Types1

1 The component is installed together with Microsoft SQL Server only.

Hardware

CPU: x86-64 processor (i386 or later).

Memory: 1 GB RAM or more. Memory consumption varies depending on the backup type and the total amount of backed-up data.

Disk Space: 100 MB free disk space for product installation.

Network: 10 Mbps or faster network connection to a backup target.

System firmware: BIOS or UEFI.

Disk layout: MBR or GPT.

For virtual machines: Only full virtualization type is supported. Containers and paravirtualized instances are not supported. Oracle VM virtual machines are supported with limitations.

OS

Linux kernel is supported from version 2.6.32 up to version 5.7.191.

Both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the following distributions are supported2:

• Debian 8.0 – 10.4
• Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 19.10, 20.04
• RHEL 6.0 – 8.23
• CentOS 6.0 – 8.23
• Oracle Linux 6 – 8.2 (RHCK)3
• Oracle Linux 6 (starting from UEK R1) – Oracle Linux 8 (up to UEK R6)
• SLES 11 SP4, 12 SP1 – 15 SP1
• SLES for SAP 11 SP4, 12 SP1 – 15 SP1
• Fedora 30 – 32
• openSUSE Leap 15.2

• openSUSE Tumbleweed

1 As long as you use kernels supplied by your distribution. Consider the following limitations:

• Fedora is supported up to kernel 5.7.7, inclusive.
• openSUSE Tumbleweed is supported up to kernel 5.7.7, inclusive.
• Linux kernel 2.6.32-754.6.3 in CentOS / RHEL and Oracle Linux (RHCK) is not supported.

2 Consider the following:

• Only GA versions that have been released before the current version of Veeam Agent for Linux are supported.
• The Linux OS must be set up to receive software updates from the default repositories enabled in the OS after installation.

• For cloud-based installations that use customized kernels (such as Linux distributions deployed from AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace), the veeamsnap kernel module has experimental support status. For details about experimental support, see this Veeam KB article.

• For CentOS / RHEL 6.0 – 6.3, Fedora and openSUSE 11.3 – 13.2, 42.0 – 42.1, Tumbleweed distributions, automatic Veeam Agent deployment from Veeam Backup & Replication is not supported. You need to install Veeam Agent for Linux directly on a target machine. For details, see the Installing Veeam Agent for Linux section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

After that, you can add this machine to the Veeam Backup & Replication inventory and start managing Veeam Agent running on the machine.

3 RHEL / CentOS / Oracle Linux (RHCK) 6.10, 7.7, and 8.2 are supported up to certain kernel versions. For details, see this Veeam KB article.

File System

Veeam Agent for Linux supports consistent snapshot-based data backup for the following file systems1:

• Btrfs (for OSes that run Linux kernel version from 3.16 up to 5.7.19)

• Ext 2/3/4
• F2FS
• FAT16
• FAT32
• HFS
• HFS+
• JFS
• NILFS2
• NTFS
• ReiserFS
• XFS

The supported file system (except for Btrfs) can reside on a simple volume or LVM2 volume. Btrfs is supported only if it resides directly on a physical device with no additional abstraction layers (such as LVM, software RAID, dm-crypt and so on) below or above it.

Data that reside in other file systems (including NFS and SMB shares) can be backed up using the snapshot-less mode. For details, see the Snapshot-Less File-Level Backup section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

1 Consider the following:

• Veeam Agent for Linux does not back up volumes that reside on USB devices and SD cards.
• Total size of all file systems included in a file-level backup must not exceed 128 TB. Size of a file included in a file-level backup must not exceed 16 TB.
• Each volume included in a backup must have a unique UUID.
• The veeamsnap module provides RAM-based changed block tracking (CBT) mechanism. Every time the module is unloaded or Veeam Agent for Linux computer is rebooted, CBT data is reset. As a result, Veeam Agent reads the entire data added to the backup scope to detect what blocks have changed since the last job session, and incremental backup requires greater time.
• Backup of machines used as cluster nodes is not supported (that includes backup of machines that use shared disks, clustered file systems or clustered LVM).

• Certain limitations for EMC PowerPath configuration apply. To learn more, see this Veeam KB article.
• BFQ I/O scheduler is not supported.

• Sparse files are not supported. Veeam Agent backs up and restores sparse files as regular files.

Software

Important! Linux user account used to work with Veeam Agent for Linux must have the /bin/bash shell set as the default shell.

Protected computer must have the following components installed1:

• dkms2
• gcc2
• make2
• perl2
• linux-headers3 (for Debian-based systems)
• kernel-headers2,3 (for RedHat-based systems)
• kernel-devel2,3 (for RedHat-based systems)
• libudev
• libacl
• libattr
• lvm2
• libfuse
• libncurses54
• dmidecode5
• openssh-server
• openssh-clients

• libmysqlclient46

• libpq57

• python38

• efibootmgr (for UEFI-based systems)
• isolinux (for Debian-based systems)
• syslinux (for RedHat-based systems)
• btrfs-progs (for backup of Btrfs file system)9

1 To install Veeam Agent for Linux packages on a target computer, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the default package manager of the Linux distribution running on this computer. During the installation process, the package manager checks whether all prerequisite software is available on the computer. If some of the required software components are missing, the package manager will attempt to install the missing packages from a software repository configured in the OS.

2 Does not apply to CentOS, RHEL, SLES distributions. For details, see the Installing Veeam Agent for Linux section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

3 Package version varies according to the Linux kernel version that you use.

4 For openSUSE 15 and SLES 15 distributions, either of the following packages is required: libncurses5 or libncurses6.

5 Required for Veeam Agent management — a valid BIOS UUID must be obtainable either from dmidecode | grep -i uuid or from /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid. Each Veeam Agent that consumes a license installed in Veeam Backup & Replication must have a unique BIOS UUID. If a valid UUID cannot be obtained, Veeam will generate it automatically.

6 A package with the MySQL database client library is required to process MySQL database system located on the Veeam Agent server. Package version varies depending on the MySQL database system version that you use.

7 A package with the PostgreSQL database client library is required to process PostgreSQL database system located on the Veeam Agent server.

8 Consider the following:

• Required for CentOS, RHEL 7.0 and later if a pre-built binary kmod-veeamsnap package is to be installed.
• If the python3 package is not available for your Linux distribution, you can use the python3-setuptools package or another package that represents Python 3 in your Linux distribution. For instructions on how to install such packages, refer to the official information resources for your Linux distribution.

9 The btrfs-progs package version 3.16 or later is required.