Veeam B&R and Clients with changing IP's

Question

Hi, I am using B&R on a home network with a bunch of Windows machines. These machines get their IP via DHCP from pfSense. This worked well for a long time as pfSense will hand out the same IP’s based on MAC address. However, I recently upgraded my pfSense machine and those mapping are lost and now B&R cannot connect to the Windows clients. All clients have Agent installed and so I’m wondering why the connect is lost...shouldn’t the Agent be able to let B&R server know what is the new IP address?

What is best practice in terms of setup so this doesnt happen again? I would prefer to not use static IP’s for each machine. Googling, some posts suggest setting up a local DNS server on pfSense. Has anyone tried this with good success?

Thank you!

tm67 · Accepted Answer

Hi HammerThe agent doesn’t push its IP address to VBR. In a protection group for individual computers, VBR connects to the agent for rescans, deployment, jobs and so on. It uses the name or IP you entered when you added the computer in this protection group. If you added the machines by IP, VBR keeps trying the old addresses.I have two options in mindOption 1: Use hostnames instead of IPsAdd the computers to the protection group by DNS name, then rescan. This only works if the VBR server can resolve the client names to their current IPs. A local DNS server that registers the DHCP clients handles that, and pfSense can do it as far as i know (unbound DNS?)Option 2: Let the agents connect to VBRUse a backup policy (“Managed by agent”). In this mode the agents connect to the VBR server and run the backups themselves, so client IP changes matter much less.(but to apply the policy, the VBR still needs the correct connection to the agents...)Hope this helpsTimo

lucasmagnum · Answer

​@Hammer hi !!🚀VBR does not automatically receive the agent's new IP address. When computers are added to a Protection Group using their IP addresses, the server continues trying to communicate with the previously registered addresses.In my environment, I was able to resolve this by adding the computers using their DNS hostnames, ensuring that VBR can resolve the names to their current IP addresses.Another alternative is to use managed by agent mode, where the agents initiate communication with VBR to perform backups, reducing dependency on fixed IP addresses.This second option can be particularly useful in environments where computers receive their IP addresses through DHCP.If resolving this issue is urgent, I recommend opening a support ticket with Veeam in parallel to get their assistance with the scenario.

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