System Requirements for Linux Computers

You can use Veeam Backup & Replication to manage Veeam Agent for Linux that was installed using a package with the Veeam kernel module dependency or using a nosnap package without dependency on the Veeam kernel module. On IBM Power Systems, Veeam Agent for Linux can be installed using a special nosnap package — Veeam Agent for Linux on Power.

Veeam kernel module is used for creating system snapshots. The nosnap version of Veeam Agent for Linux leverages the native snapshot capabilities of the supported file systems. For information on system requirements for nosnap versions of Veeam Agent for Linux, see System Requirements for Linux Computers (nosnap Veeam Agent).

Veeam Agent Computer (Veeam Kernel Module)

Considerations and Limitations

Hardware

• For virtual machines, only full virtualization type is supported. Oracle VM virtual machines are supported with limitations. Virtual I/O (VirtIO) devices have experimental support status. Other containers and paravirtualized instances are not supported; backup of such devices may result in corruption of the source file system — for more information, see this Veeam KB article.

• Devices managed by Veritas Volume Manager are not supported.

OS

• Linux kernel version 2.6.32 to version 6.16 is supported as long as you use kernels supplied by your distribution with the following limitation: Linux kernel 2.6.32-754.6.3 in RHEL and Oracle Linux (RHCK) is not supported.

• Only GA versions of the supported distributions that have been released before the current version of Veeam Agent for Linux are supported.

If a new version of a supported Linux distribution is released after the release of the current version of Veeam Agent, Veeam Agent may require a patch to support this new OS version. To learn more about Veeam Agent compatibility with Linux OS versions, see this Veeam KB article. Customers with a valid contract can request a patch from Veeam Support; for other customers, the support of the new Linux distribution will be provided with the next release of Veeam Agent.

• To ensure proper functioning of the Veeam kernel module, verify that your system does not have any of the following modules installed: hcpdriver, snapapi26, snapapi, snapper, dattobd, dattobd-dkms, dkms-dattobd, cdr or cxbf.

• 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 that are not in the list of supported OSes), the veeamsnap kernel module has an experimental support status.
• For backups of cloud machines running Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023, only file-level restore is supported.

• RHEL and Oracle Linux (RHCK) are supported up to certain kernel versions. To learn more, see this Veeam KB article.

• Ubuntu with Linux kernel for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is not supported. For the list of linux-kvm kernels for Ubuntu, see Ubuntu documentation.

• You must not install Veeam Agent on servers that are used as hardened repositories in the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

• You must not install Veeam Agent on devices that are used as deduplicating storage appliances in the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

• Do not use Veeam Agent managed by one Veeam Backup & Replication installation on a server that acts as a backup infrastructure component in another Veeam Backup & Replication installation. If this happens, both Veeam Backup & Replication installations can automatically update the Transport and Deployer components on the host server, which may lead to performance issues or errors in your backup infrastructure.

File System

• Veeam Agent for Linux does not back up volumes that reside on USB devices and SD cards.

• Veeam Agent for Linux does not back up LVM snapshots.
• File-level backup has the following limitations:

• Total size of all file systems must not exceed 216 TiB. This limitation applies to all file systems where files you plan to back up are located.
• Size of a file included in a file-level backup must not exceed 16 TiB. 
• Name of a file must not be larger than 254 bytes.

Keep in mind that characters that you can use in the file name may be encoded in 2 bytes or more.

• To store volume snapshots, the blksnap kernel module requires an Ext4, BTRFS or XFS file system. Snapshot file cannot be stored on multi-device BTRFS.

• Veeam Agent for Linux supports backup of extended attributes with the following limitations:

• Veeam Agent for Linux backs up extended attributes only with the following public namespaces: system, security, trusted, and user.
• All extended attribute names and values of a file must not exceed 4096 bytes (size of a default ext4 file system block). Veeam Agent does not back up attributes exceeding the limit.

For the kernel version 4.13 or later, if a value of extended attribute exceeds the limit, Veeam Agent uses the ea_inodes feature. Backups created using the ea_inodes feature cannot be mounted on kernel versions up to 4.12.

• Backup of file and directory attributes (for example, a — append only, c — compressed, and so on) is not supported.

• 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.

• Consider the following about backup of computers that are used as cluster nodes:

• To back up data on local disks, you can use file-level or volume-level backup.
• Data on shared disks, clustered file systems or clustered LVM can be backed up only in the snapshot-less file-level backup mode.

• Backup of clustered file systems using a native file system snapshot, or a snapshot created with the help of custom pre-job or post-job scripts, is not supported.

To protect data on computers that function as cluster nodes, you can also create backups using nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux. For more information, see System Requirements for Linux Computers (nosnap Veeam Agent).

• Certain limitations for Dell 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 for Linux backs up and restores sparse files as regular files.

• Backup of pseudo file systems, such as /proc, /sys, tmpfs, devfs and others, is not supported.

• Backup of BTRFS volumes and subvolumes with enabled file-system compression is not supported.

• Backup of pseudo-RAID, or driver-level RAID, configurations is not supported. Only hardware RAID arrays managed by dedicated controllers and Linux native software RAID (mdadm) are supported.

Software

• 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.
• Version of the following packages varies according to the Linux kernel version that you use:

• linux-headers (for Debian-based systems)
• kernel-headers (for RHEL-based systems)
• kernel-devel (for RHEL-based systems)

• kernel-uek-devel (for Oracle Linux systems with UEK)

• The dmidecode package is 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.
• The libmysqlclient package version varies according to the MySQL database system version that you use.

• The python3 package or another RPM package providing a /usr/bin/python3 binary is required for RHEL 7.0 and later distributions if a pre-built binary kmod-veeamsnap package is to be installed.

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