Recently I was invited to a bloggers early access webinar with Veeam to get some insight into the upcoming products and I have been holding of posting until the products were GA but seeing as there is a beta available this information is already out there. To register for the beta see here. Veeam’s drive over the last few years has been impressive and there is some really good products coming out.

Finally Veeam have released a agent for physical servers, this is an evolution from the free product - Veeam Endpoint. It comes in two flavors either a desktop or server both of which are licensed separately from Veeam Backup and Replication. It supports the usual Windows versions such as 2016 / 2012 / 2008. The backups are configured on the server and can point to the Veeam Backup and Replication console or to a cloud repository. A local target can also be specified to backup locally.

A local backup cache can be configured to cache backup jobs whilst the machine is offline then it will upload to the repository once back online, handy for remote sites with unreliable comms.

The backup is a forever incremental backup type and supports guest processing. One really cool feature is the bare metal recovery, you can boot from an iso then recovery the machine whether its a physical machine or a virtual machine, you can even do this process to migrate from physical to virtual or even virtual to physical.

Physical agents can be pushed out to machines using Veeam Availability Console which can also be used to manage all Veeam environments in the organisation or if your a service provider all Veeam environments you support.

The following will illustrate some of the features.

Open the agent and choose to backup now. Notice it looks similar to Veeam Endpoint.

Choose the backup location, there is a cloud repository option but its not on the screen grab.

Choose the repository.

Choose the day when to run a synthetic backup.

Choose whether to use a configured backup cache or not.

Select the guest processing options.

Pick the schedule.

The backup will then run.

The below shot is a machine that is using a backup cache as its offline.

Then once its complete it will wait to upload.

So what does this look like in the Veeam Backup and Replication. First licenses appear under a Agent for Windows tab.

You can see the distinction between server and workstation.

The job also appears.

From the console I can do an Instant Restore which creates a new VM and restores the physical machine instantly or I can even restore this direct to Azure - pretty sweet.

Finally I want to show some shots from the bare metal recovery. First boot form an iso, from here I can point it directly to Veeam Repository.

Then I just point to the backup server, pick a restore point and restore!

To register for the beta see here.