Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 update 3 was introduced agents management. An earlier  blog post “Managing The Previously Unmanageable Veeam Agents” covered discovery and protection of the agents, this post is a quick start for doing agent management from the Veeam Backup server.

First, there are some questions to be answered:

1. Where do I want my agents backup files stored?
2. Which systems do I want to protect?
3. Do I have a service account to use to access these systems? (If you don’t have one, create one, don’t use your credentials even if they are all powerful.)
4. What Veeam infrastructure do I already have?

Group the systems to be protected into buckets:

1. Windows workstations (laptops)
2. Linux workstations (cloud instances)
3. Windows servers (standalone application servers)
4. Linux servers (application servers)
5. Windows clusters (clustered windows systems)

Determine if there is something in the environment that can be used to keep the buckets up to date. This will be the basis for the protection groups, and tends to be from Active Directory.

Setup your Veeam Backup server:

1. Check/create the necessary backup repositories to store your agent backup files
2. Add your Veeam Agent licenses into your Veeam Enterprise Manager or Veeam Backup Server
3. Create protection groups (PG) see “Managing The Previously Unmanageable Veeam Agents” Create a PG per bucket.
4. As the PG scans the systems in the group, it will automatically install the agent on to the systems in the PG.

Configure your backups:

1. Workstations: create a policy that’s applied from the backup server to the systems, these systems are “managed by agent” the policy is pushed from the backup server, but the configuration actually exists on the agent itself
2. Servers: can be either managed by agent (policy pushed from the backup server) or can be managed by the backup server, in which case the jobs look similar to VM backup jobs
3. Windows Clusters: need to be managed by the backup server