Introduction
This week I upgraded our internal lab/PoC environment from Veeam 12.3.2 to 13.1. I'd like to share my experience with this upgrade — what worked well, what you should prepare for, and a few things that aren't immediately obvious from the release notes.
Here's an overview of our lab/PoC environment:
- Enterprise Manager (Windows Server 2022)
- Backup Server (Windows Server 2022)
- ONE Monitoring (Windows Server 2022)
- 2x Backup Repositorys, Performance Tier (Windows Server 2022 / HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10)
- 2x Backup Repositorys, Performance Tier, used for Backup Copy (Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS / HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10)
On the virtualization side, we run a full VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 stack, including the Enterprise Manager integration (Veeam plugin) in VMware Cloud Director.
Storage integration is not currently in use, and neither are Veeam backup agents — so this is a pure virtualization backup environment.
This setup essentially mirrors our production environments, which made it a good candidate for testing the upgrade path.
As with any software release, regardless of vendor, I always wait for a first point release before upgrading anything meaningful.
With Veeam Data Platform 13.1 out, it was the perfect time to run through the upgrade process on one of our environments.
The plan for the near future (covering the rest of this year and 2027) is to upgrade all environments to Veeam Data Platform 13.1.
Migrating the Windows-based environments over to the Veeam Software Appliance (VSA) is a separate topic I'll cover in a future post.
An important date to keep in mind: support for Veeam 12 versions ends in February 2027 — after that, you won't receive feature or security updates for your environment.
No need to panic, but it's worth factoring into your planning now.
The Upgrade
Quick and painless — the upgrade went through without any problems whatsoever.
Planning and Preparation
Before upgrading, ask yourself:
- Can you meet the system requirements?
- Do you have dependencies, such as billing or monitoring scripts, tied to the current version?
- Are you using storage integration?
- Do any of the features deprecated in Veeam 13 affect you?
These are just a few of the questions worth asking. In general, it really pays off to review your environment for anything "special" or any dependencies beforehand — every environment is different, whether you're a cloud service provider or an SMB.
A Few Additional Notes
Veeam ONE and individual database passwords: If you use individual passwords for your databases, you'll need to generate an additional password for the cache database that Veeam ONE uses starting in version 13.
This is easy to miss if you're following a standard upgrade checklist that doesn't call it out explicitly.
Storage integration and plugin availability: If you use storage integration, check whether the plugin for your storage system has already been released for version 13.
Plugins are now gradually becoming available directly from storage manufacturers, based on Veeam's new Universal Storage API.
I'll cover this shift in more detail in an upcoming post — it changes how storage integrations are delivered and maintained going forward.
Conclusion
All in all, the upgrade experience was — as usual for Veeam products — easy and straightforward.
As mentioned above, now is a good time to start planning your upgrade to Veeam 13 and get more out of your backup environment.
Have you started planning your own upgrade to 13.1 yet? What's the biggest blocker for you — system requirements, plugin availability, or something else? Let me know in the comments.
