Requirements and Limitations

Important

Veeam offers experimental support for the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO. For more information, see this Knowledge Base article.

To be eligible for support, you must use an unmodified version of the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO on a machine that meets all the system requirements.

In addition to the general backup repository and hardened repository system requirements, the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO has specific requirements and limitations.

Requirements

The following requirements must be met:

The Veeam Backup & Replication version must be 12.2 or later.
All hardware must be on the Red Hat compatibility list or CIQ certified hardware list.

UEFI secure boot must be enabled.

Third party security software must not be installed on the server.
Only hardware RAID controllers must be used. Software RAID, Intel VMD VROC, and FakeRAID controllers are not supported.

RAID controllers must have write-back cache enabled.

The server must have at least two storage volumes:

A separate volume for the operating system (minimum 100GB).
At least one additional volume for data. All additional data volumes must be larger than the operating system volume.

Tip

It is strongly recommended that you use at least a dual parity RAID configuration.

Internal or direct attached storage volumes must be used.

In addition to the standard set of ports that must be opened for a backup/hardened repository, a direct or HTTP proxy connection to repository.veeam.com on port 443 is also required for security and operating system updates. Without this connection, the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) keys will eventually expire. Once these keys have expired, no further updates will be possible and a full re-installation of the operating system will be required.
To prevent unauthorized access or deletion of the hardened repository, the BMC (base management controller) port on your server hardware must be secured using appropriate measures such as firewalls and strong passwords.

Limitations

The solution has the following limitations:

Multipathing for storage volumes is not supported.
Updates to the server occur automatically at 8:00 AM of the configured time zone. However, the server will not automatically reboot. Additionally, there are no notifications about required reboots. To make sure that all updates are installed and applied properly, reboot the hardened repository regularly.

The ISO does not currently have a “repair mode”. If the operating system volume is lost due to a RAID failure or similar issue, you will need to install another supported Linux-based operating system and mount the storage volume or volumes to access your data.

iSCSI or Fibre Channel LUNs provisioned to the server are not supported.

Wireless network connections are not supported.