I’m going to preface this by saying, please please please, never try this in a production environment!!!
But yes, it is technically possible to run Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agent for Windows, Veeam Agent for Linux, and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 on a PlayStation 4 (PS4).
‘How?’ and ‘why?’ are the logical questions to ask at this point, so let’s take a quick look.
The PS4 has been ‘jailbroken’ for some time, to the point that you can run Linux distributions on it, just like you used to be able to officially within the Playstation 3 era, for a while anyway before Sony removed the feature.
A developer called Noob404 has released a PS4 port of Proxmox, the well known hypervisor platform, and has managed to successfully get Windows 10 to run on their PS4.
As Windows 10 is a supported OS for many Veeam products, this does unintentionally enable their ability to run on a PS4!
Based on AMD’s infamous FX series of CPUs & APUs, the PS4 has dual quad-core modules, allowing for a total of 8 cores, though you’d certainly get better performance with a PS4 pro as the PS4’s CPU clock speed is only 1.6Ghz per core, with the PS4 Pro increasing this to a more respectable 2.13Ghz. Both models have 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, though the PS4 Pro also has an extra 1GB of DDR3 for its own OS functions.
With support for 1Gbps ethernet, USB3 and Wireless connectivity, it’s certainly possible that you could use the Veeam Agents to protect any OS installations you might make, or even deploy a VBR or VB365 server on the PS4, though it certainly wouldn’t make much sense as anything more than orchestrating your backup jobs or maybe as a low-end backup repository. As for the question of licensing Windows on a PS4, no comment!
So, if you’ve got a PS4 with a dead Blu-ray drive that’s gathering dust, this could be an interesting DIY project!
Where would you like to see Veeam deployed next?
