Veeam Backup and Replication remote Linux Host via Overlay VPN

For backup traffic you can/should use the Preferred Networks. I’m not sure if this is also works for deploying an agent.

Specifying Preferred Networks - User Guide for VMware vSphere 

Otherwise you must configure Managed Servers, that they use VPN connection for communication with VBR

Hey Pete,

thanks for your explanation, much appreciated. The thing is, the Veeam Server already connects to hosts on the local networks. Now if I understand correctly, changing the preferred network would then render the other hosts unavailable, right?

Is there a possibilty to add a linux vm to our infrastructure as some kind of a man in the middle? I “know” that there is some kind of a proxy solution but like I said, pretty new to that whole topic.

Thanks
Andreas

Is the Linux server a repository or something else?  The initial post is not clear on that.  Not sure if the preferred network would work in this case as all components need to talk to each other.  Not sure if adding a static route or hosts entry would help.

The linux host I am trying to setup would be a regular client e.g. agent that needs to be backed up, later on, that was the idea, it should als act as a repository as it has big drives attached we’d like to use as backup storage.

Main idea here anyway was to get the Veeam Server connect to the Linux Host via Netbird. The linux host would be our first one that sits at a Cloud Provider. All other hosts and repositories are sitting in the same private networks as the Veeam Server. Hope that makes sense. 

I think you are going to have to look in to Netbird and their support.  I am sure there is ways to set that up so it will always route properly.  For the Agent backup you could do it standalone (install on Linux) and set up the backup from there versus trying to manage it from VBR as a workaround.  Veeam uses the preferred networks as posted and is acting how it should so Netbird is the other avenue to pursue now to get it fully working.

​@andreas.mueller - hmm..not sure on this one. I’m curious as to the solution though. Maybe reach out to Netbird or Veeam Support for assistance. If you can, please provide the solution (if no one else has any ideas).

Best.

Thanks for the update Andreas 👍🏻

Glad to hear you were able to get things working again.

​@andreas.mueller - Can you provide details on how you setup Netbird to facilitate the connections?

I have Netbird self-host installed on a VPS and Veeam B&R installed locally. I want to backup a different VPS host. I originally had only a couple of routing peers installed locally and had the Veeam B&R as a resource. Since Veeam was not able to install the Veaam agent on the VPS, I thought installing the Netbird client directly on the Veeam B&R server would help but it did not. From the Veeam B&R server, I can ping the Netbird hostname and Netbird IP of the VPS but it just won’t install the Veeam agent. I did create a Netbird policy to allow SSH on the VPS.

I’m out of ideas. Can you provide details on how you got it working?

SSH is not enough, you wanna check their docs on all the ports veeam uses for data transfer.

When I originally posted, I neglected to post that I did have all ports open. I also had Netbird SSH Access with root login enabled in the Netbird policy which was the root of all of my problems.

When this feature was enabled, the only successful SSH logins were from the Netbird dashboard. I could no longer login with PuTTY and Veeam logins were also failing. I tried all of the flags listed in the Netbird docs such as `--allow-server-ssh`  but nothing fixed the SSH login failures. I ended up disabling SSH Access in Netbird. That fixed the problem.

​@andreas.mueller - Do you have SSH Access enabled? To be clear, I’m not referring to port 22. I’m referring to Netbird SSH Access which seems to work like a reverse-proxy for SSH.