Some of the biggest news coming out of VeeamON 2015 was based around yet another new free product from Veeam – this time, tackling the Linux market with what was then dubbed to be called Veeam Backup for Linux. You can read about my thoughts around the product when it was announced here – or all of my coverage from VeeamON here. That said VeeamON is all in the past, and my predictions for Veeam Backup for Linux at the time were, well, let’s just say mostly incorrect 🙂
A new name – A new beta
Fast forward to present day and we now have a new name for the product – the newly renamed Veeam Agent for Linux has also been released into a public beta! So if you fancy yourself some tab-completed, neck-bearded, command-line, bash-junky veeamy goodness you can go ahead and sign up for the beta yourself! The bits will be handed out in a first come first-serve manner so I suggest you stop reading this and go ahead and sign up (and then come back of course :))
So what are we looking at?
To kick things off we have support for both Debian and RedHat based Linux distributions. In true Veeam fashion of trying to make things as easy as possible there is now running any “make” or “install” craziness – the product simply comes shipped as a .deb OR .rpm packages depending on your preferred distribution. As far as kernel support – so long as you are running 2.6.32 or higher you are good – which is a pretty hefty backport of kernel support for a new product in my opinion, supporting kernel releases back into late 2009! Also supporting both 32 and 64 bit kernels I’d say we are well covered for a 1.0 beta!
Let’s give it a shot!
To kick things off I’ve setup an instance of Ubuntu server, running 14.04. Now there are a number of prerequisites that we will need installed before we can successfully install Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) – I’m not going to list them all here, you can see them in the VAL forum that has been created for the beta – think of the normal culprits like gcc, make, etc.. Now, you can go ahead and install these one by one – or you can simply do it the lazy way, by attempting to install the deb package, allowing it to fail, then running an apt-get -f install (shown below)
At this point you can go ahead and install the VeeamSnap package, then proceed to do the same excercise of “apt-get -f install” with the Veeam package itself to handle any prerequisites for it.
As far as where I’m going to place my backups for the purposes of this post it’s simply just sitting on a secondary drive that I have attached to my test VM – however you could, and most likely should attach some sort of NFS mount to get your backups off host. In the future and I’m hoping not too long from now we will see some sort of Veeam Backup and Replication repository integration – similar to that we have seen with Veeam Endpoint for Windows.
Veeam have done an amazing job with the interface that they provide on Veeam Agent for Linux. At times you might forget you are even on a command line as the UI is pretty advanced for bash 🙂 To kick things off and create our first job let’s go ahead and run “sudo veeam” as shown below and ‘C’ for configure…
First things first – give the job a name.
As far as the backup mode goes I selected Volume Level – but if you are following along you see you have the option to also do the complete machine level or file-level as well. Below I’ve selected my OS drive as my source.
Again, my destination is local and I’ve set it to maintain 14 restore points.
And, if you chose to do so you can set a schedule…
If you are a Veeam Backup and Replication user then you might be used to certain statistics when looking at running jobs – as you can see below, the bash UI that Veeam has created gives us the same look and feel as that of B&R – allowing us to see the Bottleneck and data statistics just as we do in B&R – this is a huge feature in my mind!
So with that we have successfully installed and configured the new Veeam Agent for Linux beta – also, we have created and successfully ran a backup job. So far so good! That said, backups are only half the battle – restorations is where its at! So how do we restore files within the Veeam Agent for Linux? First up, select your backup job and hit ‘R’.
Then, select the backup you wish to recover from (restore point) and hit enter – you should get a message stating that your backup has been mounted to /mnt/backup/ (as shown below)
From there you can simply exit the Veeam UI, navigate to /mnt/backup/ and restore by copying whatever files/directories you wish to wherever you wish…
Once you have completed restoring your files, simply go back into the Veeam Agent for Linux UI, select your Job Name and hit ‘U’ to unmount the backup from the machine.
So there you have it! The first beta for the newly renamed Veeam Agent for Linux has arrived! If you would like to help shape the product by providing feedback I’d recommend you go out and pull this beta down now and start playing around with it! Thanks for reading!
