Veeam Agent for Linux 6.3 Release Notes

This document provides last-minute information about Veeam Agent for Linux, including system requirements and installation, as well as relevant information on technical support, documentation, online resources and so on.

The release version of Veeam Agent for Linux 6.3.1.1016 is available for installation from the Veeam software repository starting from March 19, 2025.

The Veeam software repository packages are available for download at: https://www.veeam.com/downloads.html. Download the package and install it on the computer where you plan to install Veeam Agent for Linux. Then follow the instructions in the Installing Veeam Agent for Linux section.

System Requirements

Hardware

CPU: x86, x64, IBM POWER 9, IBM POWER 10

Memory: 1 GB RAM or more. Memory consumption varies depending on the backup type and the total amount of backed-up data.

Disk Space: 100 MB free disk space for product installation.

Network: 10 Mbps or faster network connection to a backup target.

System firmware: BIOS or UEFI.

Disk layout: MBR or GPT.

For virtual machines: Only full virtualization type is supported. Containers and paravirtualized instances are not supported. OVM is supported with limitations.

OS

Linux kernels from version 2.6.32 to version 6.13 are supported.

Veeam Agent for Linux supports 64-bit versions of the following distributions:

• Debian 10.13 – 12.9
• Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, 22.10, 23.04, 23.10, 24.04 and 24.10
• RHEL 6.4 – 9.5
• Rocky Linux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.5
• AlmaLinux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.5
• CentOS 7
• Oracle Linux 6 – 9.5 (RHCK)
• Oracle Linux 6 (starting from UEK R2) – Oracle Linux 8 (up to UEK R6)
• Oracle Linux 8 (UEK R7) — for information on installation, see this Veeam KB article.
• Oracle Linux 9 (up to 5.15.0-305.176.4.el9uek)
• SLES 12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1 – 15 SP6
• SLES for SAP 12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1 – 15 SP6
• Fedora 36, 37, 38 and 39
• openSUSE Leap 15.3 – 15.6
• openSUSE Tumbleweed has an experimental support status. For details about experimental support, see this Veeam KB article.

Veeam Agent for Linux supports 32-bit versions of RHEL 6 and Oracle Linux 6 distributions only.

Veeam Agent for Linux supports IBM POWER versions of the following distributions:

• SLES 15 SP3, 15 SP4, 15 SP5, 15 SP6
• SLES for SAP 12 SP5, 15 SP3, 15 SP4, 15 SP5, 15 SP6
• RHEL 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10, 9.0, 9.2, 9.4
• RHEL for SAP 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.10, 9.0, 9.2, 9.4

File System

Veeam Agent for Linux supports consistent snapshot-based data backup for the following file systems:

• BTRFS (for OSes that run Linux kernel 3.16 or later)
• Ext 2/3/4
• F2FS
• FAT16
• FAT32
• HFS
• HFS+
• JFS
• NTFS
• ReiserFS
• XFS

The supported file system (except for BTRFS) can reside on a simple volume or LVM2 volume; volumes protected with encryption software such as dm-crypt are supported. BTRFS is supported only if it resides directly on a physical device with no additional abstraction layers (such as LVM, software RAID, dm-crypt and so on) below or above it.

Data that resides on other file systems and volumes (including NFS and SMB shares) can be backed up using the snapshot-less mode. For details, see the Snapshot-Less File-Level Backup section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

Software

Protected computer must have the following components installed:

• dkms
• gcc
• make
• perl
• linux-headers (for Debian-based systems)
• kernel-headers (for RedHat-based systems)
• kernel-devel (for RedHat-based systems)
• libudev
• libacl
• libattr
• lvm2
• libfuse2 (FUSE libraries for Debian-based and SLES-based systems)
• fuse-libs (FUSE libraries for RedHat-based and Fedora systems)
• libncurses5
• dmidecode
• libmysqlclient
• libpq5
• python3
• efibootmgr (for UEFI-based systems)
• isolinux (for Debian-based systems)
• syslinux (for RedHat-based systems)
• btrfs-progs (for backup of BTRFS file system)
• mksquashfs (for custom Veeam Recovery Media)
• unsquashfs (for custom Veeam Recovery Media)
• wget (for custom Veeam Recovery Media)
• xorriso (for custom Veeam Recovery Media with EFI support)
• tar (for file system indexing, log export and rotation)
• gzip (for file system indexing, log export and rotation)

Backup Target

Backup can be performed to the following types of storage:

• On-premises or cloud-based object storage.
• Local (internal) storage of the protected computer (not recommended).
• Direct attached storage (DAS), such as USB, eSATA or Firewire external drives.
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) able to represent itself as SMB (CIFS) or NFS share.
• Veeam Backup & Replication 12.3.1 or later backup repository (including deduplication appliances).
• Veeam Cloud Connect 12 or later cloud repository.

Considerations and Limitations

Hardware

• For virtual machines, only full virtualization type is supported. Oracle VM virtual machines are supported with limitations. Virtual I/O (VirtIO) devices have experimental support status. Other containers and paravirtualized instances are not supported; backup of such devices may result in corruption of the source file system — for more information, see this Veeam KB article.
• Devices managed by Veritas Volume Manager are not supported.

OS

• Linux kernel version 2.6.32 to version 6.13 is supported as long as you use the kernel supplied by your distribution. Consider the following limitations:
  • Fedora 38, 39 and openSUSE Tumbleweed are supported up to kernel 6.13.
  • Linux kernel 2.6.32-754.6.3 in CentOS/RHEL and Oracle Linux (RHCK) is not supported.
• Only GA versions of the supported distributions that have been released before the current version of Veeam Agent for Linux are supported. If a new version of a supported Linux distribution is released after the release of the current version of Veeam Agent, Veeam Agent may require a patch to support this new OS version. For details on Veeam Agent compatibility with Linux OS versions, see this Veeam KB article.
• For the following distributions, we recommend installing Veeam kernel modules from pre-built binary packages provided by Veeam:
  • CentOS 7
  • RHEL 6.4 – 9.5
  • Rocky Linux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.5
  • AlmaLinux 8.10, 9.3 – 9.5
  • SLES 12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1 – 15 SP6
  • SLES for SAP 12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1 – 15 SP6
  • openSUSE Leap 15.3 – 15.6

  For other supported distributions, use the dkms packages instead of the pre-built binary packages with Veeam kernel modules. Keep in mind the following limitations for Veeam kernel modules:

  • Pre-built binary veeamsnap kernel module packages require kernel 2.6.32-131.0.15 or later for RHEL 6 (excluding 2.6.32-279.el6.i686) and 3.10.0-123 or later for CentOS / RHEL 7.0–7.9.
  • Pre-built binary blksnap kernel module packages require kernel 5.3.18 or later.
• To ensure proper functioning of the Veeam kernel modules, verify that your system does not have any of the following modules installed: hcdriver, snapapi26, snapapi, snapper, dattobd, dattobd-dkms, dkms-dattobd, cdr or cxbf.
• The Linux OS must be set up to receive software updates from the default repositories enabled in the OS after installation.
• For cloud-based installations that use customized kernels (such as Linux distributions deployed from AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace), the Veeam kernel modules have an experimental support status. For details about experimental support, see this Veeam KB article.
• Automatic updates from the Veeam backup console are not supported for manually deployed Veeam Agents.
• RHEL, CentOS and Oracle Linux (RHCK) are supported up to certain kernel versions. For details, see this Veeam KB article.
• Ubuntu with Linux kernel for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is not supported. For the list of linux-kvm kernels for Ubuntu, see Ubuntu documentation.
• [Oracle Linux (UEK) 6.6–7.4] If the operating system has the FIPS mode enabled, you must sign the DKMS Veeam kernel module. For more information on automating the process of signing DKMS kernel modules, see Linux documentation.

File System

• File-level backup has the following limitations:
  • Total size of all file systems must not exceed 216 TiB. This limitation applies to all file systems where files you plan to back up are located.
  • Size of a file included in a file-level backup must not exceed 16 TB.
  • Name of a file must not be larger than 254 bytes.

    Keep in mind that characters that you can use in the file name may be encoded in 2 bytes or more.

• To store volume snapshots, the blksnap kernel module requires an Ext4, BTRFS or XFS file system.
• The amount of space required for LVM snapshots largely depends on the IO intensity. Generally, from 10% to 20% of the system’s occupied space should be enough for storing an LVM snapshot.
• Veeam Agent supports backup of extended attributes with the following limitations:
  • Veeam Agent backs up extended attributes only with the following public namespaces: system, security, trusted, and user.
  • All extended attribute names and values of a file must not exceed 4096 bytes (size of a default ext4 file system block). Veeam Agent does not back up attributes exceeding the limit.

    For the kernel version 4.13 or later, if a value of extended attribute exceeds the limit, Veeam Agent uses the ea_inodes feature. Backups created using the ea_inodes feature cannot be mounted on kernel versions up to 4.12.

• Each volume included in a backup must have a unique UUID.
• Veeam kernel modules provide a RAM-based changed block tracking (CBT) mechanism. Every time the module is unloaded, or Veeam Agent for Linux computer is rebooted, CBT data is reset. As a result, Veeam Agent reads the entire data added to the backup scope to detect what blocks have changed since the last job session, and incremental backup requires more time.
• Backup of machines used as cluster nodes can be taken only by the veeam-nosnap package. For details, see System Requirements for Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux in the user guide.
• Certain limitations for Dell PowerPath configuration apply. To learn more, see this Veeam KB article.
• Backup of file and directory attributes (for example, a — append only, c — compressed, and so on) is not supported.
• Veeam Agent does not back up volumes that reside on USB devices and SD cards.
• Veeam Agent does not back up LVM snapshots.
• BFQ I/O scheduler is not supported.
• Sparse files are not supported. Veeam Agent backs up and restores sparse files as regular files.
• Backup of pseudo file systems, such as /proc, /sys, tmpfs, devfs and others, is not supported.
• During backup, network file systems are skipped unless explicitly included into the backup scope.
• Backup of BTRFS volumes and subvolumes with enabled file-system compression is not supported.

Software

• The following packages are not required for CentOS, RHEL and SLES distributions if a pre-built binary package with Veeam kernel module is to be installed:
  • dkms
  • gcc
  • make
  • perl
  • kernel-headers (for RedHat-based systems)
  • kernel-devel (for RedHat-based systems)
• Version of the following packages varies according to the Linux kernel version that you use:
  • linux-headers (for Debian-based systems)
  • kernel-headers (for RedHat-based systems)
  • kernel-devel (for RedHat-based systems)
• For openSUSE and SLES distributions, either of the following packages is required: libncurses5 or libncurses6.
• The dmidecode package is required for Veeam Agent management — a valid BIOS UUID must be obtainable either from dmidecode | grep -i uuid or from /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid. Each Veeam Agent that consumes a license installed in Veeam Backup & Replication must have a unique BIOS UUID. If a valid UUID cannot be obtained, Veeam Agent for Linux will generate it automatically.
• The libmysqlclient package is required to process MySQL database system located on the Veeam Agent server. Package version varies according to the MySQL database system version that you use.
• The libpq5 package is required to process PostgreSQL database system located on the Veeam Agent server.
• The python3 package or another RPM package providing a /usr/bin/python3 binary is required for CentOS 7, RHEL 7, RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 distributions if a pre-built binary Veeam kernel module package is to be installed.
• The btrfs-progs package version 3.16 or later is required.

Known Issues

Upgrade

General

• User interface may appear unreadable in some terminal programs due to using incorrect symbols for pseudographics. To fix the issue in the Kitty terminal emulator, select the Allow ACS line drawing in UTF check box.
• If a directory contains file with a long name consisting of 2-byte characters, the content of this directory may not be displayed in the file system tree views of the user interface.
• Modifying layouts on disks under tracking may lead to problems with unloading the Veeam kernel modules.
• [For Veeam Agent for Linux on Power] In command line interface, you can target backup job at a Veeam backup repository only if an active product license is installed.

Backup

• Volume-level backup jobs that rely on a device name under the /dev directory require volumes to have their corresponding device names under the /dev directory staying persistent — for example: /dev/md-127, /dev/dm-1. Otherwise, the job will back up the wrong volume.
• Backup to CIFS is not supported for x86+PAE systems.
• Directories encrypted with eCryptfs can be backed up only in the following conditions:
  • eСryptfs is unmounted (files will be encrypted inside the backup)
  • snapshot-less mode is used (files will be decrypted inside the backup)
• Network shares (both CIFS and NFS) can be selected as a source only in the snapshot-less mode.
• LVM physical volumes cannot be backed up, as well as RAID members. Only LVM/RAID logical volumes containing file systems can be backed up. If a physical volume is selected, then all logical volumes residing on that physical volume will be backed up.
• Disks partitioned with cfdisk version older than 2.25 are not supported.
• File-level backup masks do not apply to directories.
• Backup job type cannot be switched between file and volume levels.
• Very high data change rate during backup may cause snapshot overflow. Should this happen, the job will attempt to retry processing up to 3 times with a larger snapshot.
• Sparse files are backed up as regular files.
• Configurations with degraded LVM mirrors cannot be backed up.
• [For systems with GPT disk layout scheme] To guarantee successful data restore, the backed-up disk must not contain more than 128 partitions.

Restore

• File-level restore cannot be performed on kernels versions 4.0.x–4.1.33 due to the bug in FUSE kernel module. To work around the issue, either upgrade the kernel, or perform file-level restore from the Recovery Media, or on another machine.
• File-level restore for files residing on eCryptfs directories does not mount eCryptfs filesystem automatically.
• Concurrent file-level restore sessions from different restore points are not supported because only one restore point can be mounted at a time. To perform a file-level restore from another restore point, unmount currently mounted one first.
• Restore of encrypted devices is not supported.
• If root partition and bootloader reside on software RAID (mdadm), the following operations will have to be performed manually via usage of the tools provided in the Recovery Media:
  • bootloader installation
  • software RAID configuration
  • fstab and grub configuration adjustments
• It is required to switch the agent from “Managed by backup server” mode to “Standalone” mode in order to restore from Veeam Cloud Connect repository.
• Sparse files are restored as regular files.
• If you restore data from an encrypted backup and create a LUKS volume using the product graphical user interface, the product creates a LUKS2 volume. The LUKS2 volume can be decrypted only on Linux kernel version 4.19 or later.
• [For SLES-based systems with BTRFS file system and GNOME desktop environment ver. 3 or later] When Veeam Agent mounts a backup to the machine, GNOME detects the loop device and automatically creates its own mount point. After the restore process, you must manually remove the mount point created by GNOME, otherwise BTRFS will block the next attempt to mount the backup file.

Veeam Backup & Replication Integration

• Encrypted backups created with versions older than v3.0 cannot be imported to Veeam Agent for Linux directly.
• Instant Restore feature is not available for backups created with versions older than 3.0.

Oracle AAIP

Databases residing on ASM volumes cannot be backed up. However, they will be prepared by AAIP engine and will be shown in Veeam Explorer for Oracle without possibility to be restored.

Configurations

For GPT disks: bootloader will not be backed up if BTRFS root and BIOS boot partition reside on different physical disks.

BTRFS Support

• Configuration with a swap file residing on a BTRFS subvolume cannot be backed up.
• Bugs and issues in the kernel that affect BTRFS snapshots and send/receive functionality can cause backup jobs to fail.
• Backup progress for subvolumes cannot be properly shown on systems with btrfsprogs versions lower than v4.1.
• Large overhead can be observed in the Transferred statistics field for backup jobs that include BTRFS that has no subvolumes.
• If the root subvolume (id 5) is more than 50% full, restore of the subvolume may fail.
• If a subvolume is deleted during restore, it is required to remove the corresponding entry from fstab manually. Otherwise, the system will not boot.

Snapshot-Less Mode

• Pseudo file systems (such as /proc, /sys, tmpfs, and such) cannot be backed up in the snapshot-less mode.

ISO

• User interface may not show backups that contain localized symbols in their names.
• Using Veeam Recovery Media, you may experience certain rare issues. To learn more, see this Veeam KB article.
• The launch of the recovery UI may take more time if there are DNS or Internet access issues in the network.
• You cannot boot the system from a custom Veeam Recovery Media for Ubuntu 16.04 because this Linux distribution contains outdated drivers for the OverlayFS filesystem.

Agent Management

• Statistics for file-level backup jobs managed by the backup server may be inaccurate.

Other

• A backup job that uses a network folder as a target cannot be created on systems with Kaspersky Endpoint Security 10.
• If an LVM physical volume is selected for backup, all volume groups that fully reside in this physical volume will be backed up.

Installing Veeam Agent for Linux

You can install Veeam Agent using one of the available package sets:

• Veeam Agent for Linux — this set of packages depends on the Veeam kernel module for creating system snapshots. It works with the widest range of Linux distributions and file systems.
• Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux — this set of packages does not depend on the Veeam kernel module for creating system snapshots. Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux leverages native file system snapshot capabilities on select Linux distributions.
• Nosnap Veeam Agent for Linux on Power — this set of nosnap packages is specifically designed for IBM Power Systems.

To install Veeam Agent for Linux on a computer with a connection to the internet, you must perform the following steps:

1. Connect to the Veeam software repository.
2. Install Veeam Agent for Linux packages from the Veeam software repository.

Connecting to Veeam Software Repository

To connect to the Veeam software repository:

1. Download the latest version of the Veeam software repository installation package from the Veeam Download page at https://www.veeam.com/linux-backup-download.html to the computer where you want to install the product.
2. Browse to the directory with the downloaded veeam-release package and install the repository using one of the following commands depending on your Linux distribution:

Installing Veeam Agent Packages

Installation instructions depend on the type of the packages you want to use for Veeam Agent installation.

*Prebuilt binaries require kernel >= 2.6.32-131.0.15 for RHEL 6 and kernel >= 3.10.0-123 for CentOS / RHEL 7 to function. For other kernels, please install the veeamsnap module using the source rpm package available at the repository.

The following dependency packages may require special handling in case you see installation errors:

• dkms package is not present in default repositories for some Linux distributions. You should obtain it from third-party repositories:
  • CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Linux, Fedora, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux: EPEL repository
  • OpenSUSE: Packman repository
• Extended kernels such as kernel-pae, kernel-uek and other require appropriate kernel-devel packages to be installed, for example:

The kernel-devel version must match your current kernel version. To check your current kernel version, run uname -r.

Oracle Linux: if yum package manager installs packages that do not match your current kernel version, you should either update your system or fetch older versions of the required packages from Oracle repository: http://yum.oracle.com/.

Upgrading Veeam Agent for Linux

To upgrade Veeam Agent for Linux:

*The --force key is required to properly replace the missing link to .ko in case of update from the dkms version of the Veeam kernel module to a prebuilt binary. To stay on the dkms version, run the following command:

Uninstalling Veeam Agent for Linux

To uninstall Veeam Agent for Linux, run the following command with the name of the Veeam kernel module you used during installation — veeamsnap or blksnap:

Licensing

By installing Veeam Agent for Linux, you agree to the Veeam End User License Agreement (EULA) and 3rd party components license agreements. To view the license agreement, click the Veeam End User License Agreement link in the setup program, or visit the following link: https://www.veeam.com/eula.html.

Veeam Agent for Linux comes in different editions. You do not need to obtain or install a license to use the free edition.

Paid editions of Veeam Agent for Linux are licensed per protected computer (“Computer”). The paid license includes a one-year maintenance plan. To renew your license, please contact Veeam customer support at: renewals@veeam.com.

Technical Documentation References

To view the product help, type in your terminal:

If you have any questions about Veeam Agent for Linux, you may use the following resources:

• Product web page: https://go.veeam.com/linux
• User guide: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforlinux/userguide/
• Veeam R&D forums: https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agent-for-linux-f41

Technical Support

We offer email and phone technical support for customers with current subscriptions, as well as during the official evaluation period. For better experience, please provide the following when contacting our technical support:

• Version information for the product and all infrastructure components.
• Error message and/or description of the problem.
• Log files. To export the log files, open Veeam Agent for Linux user interface, press [M], select Export Logs, and choose a directory to export logs to.

To submit your support ticket or obtain additional information please visit https://www.veeam.com/support.html.

Contacting Veeam Software

At Veeam Software we pay close attention to comments from our customers. It is important to us not only to quickly help you with your technical support issues — we make it our mission to listen to your input, and to build our products with your suggestions in mind. Should you have a Customer Support issue or question, please feel free to contact us. We have qualified technical and customer support staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week who will help you with any inquiry that you may have.

Customer Support

For the most up to date information about our support practices, business hours and contact details, please visit https://www.veeam.com/support.html. You can also use this page to submit a support ticket and download the support policy guide.

Company Contacts

For the most up to date information about company contacts and office locations, please visit https://www.veeam.com/contacts.