Helper Appliances

Helper appliance is an auxiliary Linux-based VM instance. It is used to upload backed-up data to Google Compute Engine. Veeam Backup & Replication automatically deploys the helper appliance in Google Compute Engine only for the duration of the restore process and removes it immediately after that.

Depending on the type of backups you are restoring from and their location, the helper appliance may be required or optional. The helper appliance is required when you restore from:

Backups of Google Compute Engine VM instances that are stored in external repositories.
Backups of virtual and physical machines that are stored in object storage repositories.

The helper appliance is optional when you restore from backups of virtual and physical machines stored in backup repositories, or backups of Google Compute Engine virtual machines copied to backup repositories with backup copy jobs. It is recommended, however, to use the helper appliance in scenarios where it is optional, as the helper appliance may significantly improve restore performance. You can specify the helper appliance settings at the Helper Appliance step of the Restore to Google Compute Engine wizard.

Requirements for Helper Appliance

When configuring a helper appliance, consider the following:

If you want to restore from backups in an on-premise object storage repository, the helper appliance machine must have access to the source object storage repository. To provide access to object storage repositories, you can use VPN or Google Dedicated Interconnect. For more information, see the Google Cloud documentation.
To upload one machine disk to Google Compute Engine, the helper appliance requires 1 GB RAM. Make sure that the type of Google Compute Engine instance selected for the helper appliance offers enough memory resources to upload all machine disks. Otherwise, the restore process may fail.

The VPC route table must contain a route from the IP address of the Veeam Backup & Replication server to an active Google Cloud internet gateway. For more information on internet gateways and how to create route tables, see the Google Cloud documentation.
Check that OS Login is disabled for the project where you plan to recover VM instances. For more information on how to configure OS Login, see the Google Cloud documentation. If you want to have OS Login enabled, use restore without the helper appliance.