Managing Workers

To perform most data protection and disaster recovery operations, Veeam Backup & Replication uses workers. Workers are Linux-based VMs that are responsible for the interaction between the backup repositories and other Veeam Backup & Replication components. Workers process backup workload and distribute backup traffic when transferring data to backup repositories. Deploying multiple workers allows you to increase the maximum number of concurrent backup and restore operations, and to avoid high traffic load on a single VM.

Each worker is launched on a specific host for the duration of a backup or restore operation. While configuring the worker, you can manually select the host or instruct Veeam Backup & Replication to choose a host automatically. Manual selection may be helpful if you want to avoid launching workers on specific hosts (for example, production ones), while automatic selection allows Veeam Backup & Replication to optimize data transfer and to balance the load on the hosts in the cluster.

Worker Lifecycle

When you add a worker to the backup infrastructure, its configuration is saved to the Veeam Backup & Replication configuration database, but no VM is actually deployed on the host unless you choose to test the configuration. In the latter case, a VM (worker VM) is deployed and shut down after the test operation completes.

As soon as a backup or restore session starts, Veeam Backup & Replication tries to launch the worker and test its configuration. If no worker VM has been previously deployed, Veeam Backup & Replication deploys the VM using the worker configuration saved to the configuration database. Veeam Backup & Replication checks host affinity settings specified for the worker and chooses a host where the worker VM will run. Then, Veeam Backup & Replication powers on the worker VM and installs system updates (if available). When the backup or restore session completes, Veeam Backup & Replication shuts down the worker VM so that it can be used for other sessions later.

During the lifecycle, a worker can obtain one of the following statuses:

In This Section

• Adding Workers
• Enabling and Disabling Workers
• Editing Workers
• Testing Workers
• Disabling Automatic Worker Updates
• Removing Workers