Open feedback for popular and free Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 (RTM Pilot)

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows

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I've been kicking the tires these last few weeks on Veeam's latest free backup offering for physical systems, using a Dell Precision 5510, and my Xeon D SuperServer. It's going quite well, with numerous improvements evident throughout the already quite refined product.

I've been using Veeam backups daily on dozens of PCs since 2014's original release called Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, saving my bacon regularly, with reliability and ease-of-use. I've also been using betas of it, and I was so impatient that I had to find creative ways to get it to back up Windows 10 beta and Windows Server 2016 beta. I wasn't alone apparently, with tens of thousands of folks reading those two article. It's a very popular product, and not only is it free, but they even offer the ability to open support incidents from right within the UI.

Download

Get involved in the RTM pilot here:

• [RTM] Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0
  Apr 29 2017 by Gostev at Veeam

Of course, there's always room for improvement. I know, a lot to ask for something that's both free, and of very high quality already. But why not at least publish some ideas and FYIs out there, hopefully garnering some others to chime in and comment below. I'll admit these these notes I took were a bit rushed, and not always carefully re-tested and reproduced. Just lab notes and observations and ideas. Of course, with the general availability expected very soon, I realize these are mostly really just pipe dreams for the future.

Candid Product Feedback

I realize some of these are completely bonkers and unrealistic, but hoping to spur some conversation at least.

1. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE are mouthfuls
   a shorter name that folks would be more likely to say, like:
   Veeam Agent for Windows, Veeam Agent for Windows FREE
   -or-
   Veeam Agent for Windows, Veeam Free Agent for Windows
2. better 4K display support for bare-metal (WinPE) recovery media, see my report
3. IPSec and OpenSSL VPN client in bare-metal (WinPE) recovery media
4. support for 10GbE networking in bare-metal recovery media, as I reported, for systems like the popular Xeon D with its baked-in Intel X552/X557 10GbE
5. support for VPN (IPSec and OpenSSL) autodial baked into the backup schedule, connecting on demand as part of the daily scheduled wake-up/daily backup/sleep routine (think kid away at college, backed up to network share or repository)
6. support for all-in-one wizard for recovery USB drive creation, with room for a single stand-alone backup on it (think sending kid off to college)
7. be able to save or hold or delete particular backups, with annotation
8. be able to scroll back past just the most recent 7 backups
9. if multiple IPs in the system where created the media, you can end up with fixed IP in the USB boot environment instead of DHCP
10. when testing backup integrity, it can be a struggle sometimes doing a restore to a same sized UEFI/GPT drive inside an ESXi 6.5 VM, partitions not always auto-matched oddly, requiring manual partition selection/layout
11. being able to optionally and easily include my Outlook 2016 PST files and folder for non-Exchange accounts would avoid gigabytes of email that must re-downloaded from IMAP servers after a full bare-metal restore, and would preserving address book type-ahead cache, etc.
12. making creation of a universal bootable media with boot-time choice between using drivers from the PC it was created on or not, along with a variety of network drivers, injecting the most common 1GbE and 10GbE NIC drivers automatically, and/or additional specified drivers
13. consider a procedure to add a universal Veeam Recovery image to the PXE boot environment (WDS Server) that Windows Server 2016 Essentials offers to networked users
14. more NVMe drivers be baked into recovery media (WinPE), for example, Samsung driver is about 2-3x faster than the generic Microsoft driver
15. easier database reset procedure, integrated in uninstaller as an option
16. M-DISC native support
17. support for McAfee, in that's integrated with Bitlocker, making bootability of recovery more robust
18. better shrink algorithm of restore, other 3rd party backup products seem to handle shrink better (perhaps it's improved in Agent, haven't tested lately)
19. for the Advanced menu option, "create active full backups periodically" option, could that full backup go to a different target, say for rotating media to take off site?
20. integrate the recovery media with vSphere, allowing recovery into test VM as a way to test integrity of the backup
21. what if a servo motor device physically removes USB backup target at randomized interval, creating an air gap that's held open between backup jobs, and not other software allowed to write to that USB device
22. specify which network names to do daily backups on, so travelers don't have to worry about middle of the night hotel room backups (presumably over VPN)

May 15 2017 Update

The above list was submitted to the Veeam Community Forums here:

• Open feedback for popular and free Veeam Agent for Microsoft

Oct 17 2017 Update

Veeam Agent for Windows continues to protect many systems in my home, having gone GA (Generally Available) way back on May 11, 2017. I continue to find it a very reliable product, even had a go at the Linux version recently as well, you can read all the details here:

• Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 2 has full vSphere 6.5 Update 1 support, free NFR also available for Veeam Agent for Windows, Linux, and Backup for MS Office 365
  Aug 23 2017

See also at TinkerTry

• What Veeam is doing to help protect you from ransomware like WannaCry
  May 13 2017

• VeeamON 2017 has some remarkable technologists, and I'll be there!
  May 13 2017

• All articles featuring Veeam.

• Superguide: Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

• Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 NFR license now available to certified IT Pros, vSphere 6.5 support coming soon
  Nov 22 2016, with full vSphere 6.5 support arriving Jan 20 2017.

• The Xeon D Supermicro SuperServer "Bundle 2" of joy, a complete home datacenter virtualization solution that really flies
  Dec 07 2016

• Microsoft left the home backup server market, is Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE about to take over?
  Dec 05 2014

See also

• What you need to know about the WannaCry Ransomware
  WannaCry ransomware spreads aggressively across networks, holds files to ransom.
  May 12 2017 by Symantec Security Response

• How to protect your data from ransomware and encryption Trojans
  Aug 15 2016 by Marco Horstmann at Veeam

Disclosure

TinkerTry.com, LLC is not a Veeam Pro Partner, but I am a Veeam Vanguard Program member who received travel assistance getting to VeeamOn 2017. Veeam has been an advertiser on many virtualization sites for years now, and Veeam is currently running a BuySellAds-purchased advertisement along the top of TinkerTry as well. All TinkerTry advertisement goes through third party BuySellAds. None of my articles are sponsored posts, and there are currently no affiliate links for Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, or any of their other products. There are no commissions for any Veeam products folks buy after reading one of my articles.

TinkerTry takes extreme care to protect visitors by using only one ad network, BuySellAds, which has never had a security issue to date, and is very commonly used in the virtualization blogger community. Their CEO seems to get what's going on with ad blockers, evident in his recent post. I regularly receive lucrative offers from various companies looking to have me inject JavaScript trackers into TinkerTry, which I of course turn down.

I reserve and exercise the right to freely write about topics that I choose, whenever I choose to, an essential part of what makes blogging about home virtualization labs, storage, and backup so much fun for me. I tend to feature articles about stuff I actually use.