Just a heads up for those of you using Veeam plugins. Especially, if they are unmanaged by VBR, which we see quite often for the large line of business applications.

Today we have plugins for SAP-HANA, SAP on Oracle (Linux only), Oracle RMAN (Windows and Linux), IBM Db2 and MS-SQL.

Having done quite a few upgrades for larger customers recently, I had to learn some non-obvious peculiarities about plugin compatibility:

First, you might think (as I did), that VBR always supports the plugin of the major release below the one you’re upgrading to. In fact, it says so in the help center: “Veeam Backup & Replication supports the latest two major versions of Veeam Plug-ins.” (System Requirements - Veeam Plug-ins for Enterprise Applications).

The challange is in the term “major version”. To me, that would have meant the number before the decimal point. For example, 12 for 12.x, 11 for 11.x. 

As it turns out, this is not the case. The next sentence in the help center link above already invalidates my point: “Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1 supports Veeam Plug-in 12.1 and 12.”.

Veeam still considers some of the updates that only do changes to the decimal places to be a major update. 

So, since 12.1 is a major upgrade, if you jump from 11 to 12.1 , for example, be aware that your plugins won’t work anymore. You would have to upgrade them first.

The same goes for 11a (11.0.1.1261), which suprisingly is also considered a major upgrade. Although here the change is only after the second comma: System Requirements - Veeam Plug-ins for Enterprise Applications

So, VBR 12.0 GA (12.0.0.1420) won’t work with an early v11 plugin like e.g. 11.0.0.825. We justed faced that a week ago, when a customer went from 11GA to 12.0, thus bringing all his HANA plugin backups to a halt.

There is a comprehensive list of released plugin versions:

KB4474: Build Numbers and Versions of Veeam Plug-ins for Enterprise Applications

Unfortunately, the table does not indicate compatibility with the VBR version. 

So, make sure to double check the system requirements for every single major or (assumed) minor version you plan to upgrade your VBR to.

Otherwise you might render your database and t-log backups with your plugins unusable for some time. This can, depending on the log volume sizes allowed for in the workloads, easily bring critical databases to a halt.