Deploying Veeam v13: Physical or VM?

The answer is it depends.  It will be want you want you can do both.  For the hardened repo a physical box is best.

Afaik VHR (Veeam Hardened Repo) - as long as you use the infrastructure ISO - can and should only be deployed on physical machines, this is the best approach. I can’t recommend deploying hardened storage on virtual systems.

Deploying VBR on a VM is my personal preference since you’ll gain the best flexibility and portability. But again - this is my personal opinion.

In short:

VBR virtual, storage (hardened or ReFS) physical

You can deploy Veeam v13 on either physical or virtual both are supported. The choice depends on performance and resource needs. If your current VM setup works well upgrading it is fine. Hardened Linux repositories are supported regardless of whether VBR runs on a VM or physical server as long as the repository OS meets v13 requirements.

I read up and thought I could install the appliance based on Rocky Linux. This way, I could harden the partition on the appliance without needing a separate Ubuntu server. I suppose I’ll have to deploy it and experiment to understand it. 

For the VBR you use the VBR ISO (in case you want the appliance) and for infrastructure systems (repo, proxy, etc.) you can use the VIA (Veeam Infrastructure Appliance) ISO. Both of them rely on the Rocky Linux distribution - pretty straight forward.

You simply use two different ISOs and don’t need to deploy an own OS with that ISOs (that isn’t even supported).

In general, I agree with Lukas’s assessment of:

“In short:

VBR virtual, storage (hardened or ReFS) physical”

This way you can populate a physical device with disks to the size you need and not have to worry about another h/w layer (SAN). Although, I personally wouldn’t use ReFS..but rather XFS on Linux. And, I would keep VBR as a VM. And, at least initially...if you currently run it as a VM, keep it on Windows and do an upgrade. Let Veeam work out some recent bugs/issues that’s been found (and add needed feature sets not yet incorporated into the VSA). That’s my recommendation ​@VEEAM_Legend 

Best.

Does V13 support hardened repository copy jobs between multiple VBRs?

Yes it does without issues.

If you asking about connecting a Hardened Repository machine to more than one backup server:

• deployed with Veeam Infrastructure Appliance (VIA): not sharable, only one Backup Server possible
• deployed with „Bring your own Linux“: shareable, but officially not supported

Best,

Fabian

One VBR never knows anything about another VBR. Only VBEM can build bridges. But not for inter-jobs. Only for visibility. 

I would have a single VBR for the site anyways. Only 50% of maintenance efforts and 50% of attack surface.