System Requirements for Linux Computers with Nosnap Veeam Agent

If you plan to use a nosnap package to install Veeam Agent, the protected Linux computer must meet the following system requirements:

Specification

Requirement

Hardware

[For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux] CPU: x64.

[For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux on Power] CPU: IBM POWER9 or POWER10.

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.

Disk layout: MBR or GPT.

OS

Important! Check considerations and limitations that apply to the list of supported OSes.

Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux supports the 64-bit versions of the following distributions:

  • Debian 11.0 – 13.0
  • Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, and 24.04
  • RHEL 8.4 – 9.6 and 10.0
  • Oracle Linux 7 – 10.0 (RHCK)
  • Oracle Linux 7 (starting from UEK R4) – Oracle Linux 9 (up to 5.15.0-311.185.9.el9uek.x86_64)
  • Oracle Linux 10 (UEK R8)
  • SLES 12 SP5, 15 SP3 – 15 SP7
  • SLES for SAP 12 SP5, 15 SP3 – 15 SP7
  • Rocky Linux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.6 and 10.0
  • AlmaLinux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.6 and 10.0

Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux on Power supports little endian versions of the following Linux distributions for IBM Power:

  • SLES 15 SP3 – 15 SP7
  • SLES for SAP 12 SP5, 15 SP3 – 15 SP7
  • RHEL 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10, 9.0, 9.2, 9.4, 9.6 and 10.0
  • RHEL for SAP 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10, 9.0, 9.2, 9.4, 9.6 and 10.0

File System

Important! Check considerations and limitations that apply to the list of supported file systems.

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

  • BTRFS (for OSes that run Linux kernel 3.16 or later)

[For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux] 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.

[For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux on Power] If BTRFS has additional abstraction layers (such as LVM, software RAID, dm-crypt and so on) above it, only file-level restore operations are supported. Instant Recovery, restore verification (SureBackup), bare metal recovery and volume-level restore are not supported.

Supported file systems that are not located on logical volumes, other file systems and network file systems like NFS or SMB shares can be backed up using the snapshot-less mode only.

Software

Important! Check considerations and limitations that apply to the list of supported components.

Protected computer must have the following components installed:

For general operations, backup and restore:

  • libacl (for backup and restore of ACLs)
  • libattr (for backup and restore of extended file attributes)
  • lvm2 (for LVM snapshots and other LVM-related operations)
  • libfuse2 (FUSE libraries for Debian-based and SLES-based systems)
  • fuse-libs (FUSE libraries for RedHat-based systems)
  • dmidecode (for managing Veeam Agent with Veeam Backup & Replication, not required for Veeam Agent for Linux on Power)
  • btrfs-progs (for backup of BTRFS file system)
  • wget (for downloading recovery ISO)
  • tar (for file system indexing, log export and rotation)
  • gzip (for file system indexing, log export and rotation)

For creating custom Veeam Recovery Media (not required for Veeam Agent for Linux on Power):

  • efibootmgr (for UEFI-based systems)
  • isolinux (for Debian-based systems)
  • syslinux (for RedHat-based systems)
  • mksquashfs
  • unsquashfs
  • xorriso (for custom Veeam Recovery Media with EFI support)

Considerations and Limitations

OS

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. For details on 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.

  • The Linux OS must be set up to receive software updates from the default repositories enabled in the OS after installation.
  • [For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux] Veeam Agent supports the following versions of RHEL with Extended Update Support Add-On: 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10, 9.0, 9.2 and 9.4.
  • [For nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux on Power] Veeam Agent supports the following versions of RHEL with Extended Update Support Add-On: 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10 and 9.4.
  • You must not install Veeam Agent on servers that are used as hardened repositories 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

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

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.

NOTE

Consider the following about backup of LVM volumes:

  • During volume-level backup, data from shared disks, clustered file systems or clustered LVM will not be backed up.
  • To perform volume-level backup, Veeam Agent for Linux will create an LVM snapshot, which can cause instability of the cluster or cluster software. This can happen due to the failover conditions configured for the cluster. However, if the cluster instability is caused by creation of an LVM snapshot only during backup, contact Veeam support for assistance.
  • Backup of clustered file systems using a native file system snapshot is not supported. This includes snapshots created with the help of custom pre-job or post-job scripts.
  • The following objects can be backed up only by snapshot-less file-level backup:
  • Files on shared disks, clustered file systems or clustered LVM.
  • Files on local file systems that are not hosted by LVM or BTRFS.
  • Sparse files are not supported. Veeam Agent 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

IMPORTANT

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