Initial Configuration of Veeam B&R v12

We’ve installed Veeam B&R v12.

Now let’s go through the initial setup and review the general options before moving on to more advanced topics, such as backup and replication jobs.

Let’s start with General Options.

Let’s review the options and I’ll explain what I usually change.

I usually leave this disabled because the storage I use for backups is fast enough.

I usually leave this at the default too. If you use your own certificates, this is where you configure them!

This is where things get interesting: email settings for notifications and reports.

It’s easy to configure. I like receiving the daily summary report; you can change the time if you prefer.
When you configure email notifications, you’ll receive messages for all jobs with the statuses selected below. You can also configure email alerts for each job individually—for example, to add recipients or include more details.

If you integrate Veeam B&R with an event monitoring tool such as Nagios, Checkmk, or PRTG…

I usually leave these settings at their defaults. They’re convenient, and this information is valuable for troubleshooting—especially the available disk space.

This one is a matter of preference. I usually leave it as shown, but if you want to retain more history or see more or less historical information, this is where you change it.

Now let’s move on to Configuration Backup.

An important point: for now, we’ll configure it to use the local repository, though we can change that later. We’ll also enable encryption for this backup and set a password so that the credentials we add later are saved in the backup:

Select the checkboxes, then click Add next to Password. Create the password, apply the settings, and you’re done.

Now let’s look at the Inventory tab, where we’ll add the machines to protect with our backup and replication jobs.

Here we can see both virtual machines and physical machines with the Veeam Agent installed and connected to this server.

For example, here’s a physical machine with the agent installed.

Next, go to Backup Infrastructure. You’ll see the local repository and can add backup repositories. I also have a post showing how to create an S3 cloud repository with Wasabi; adding it is straightforward.

Here is the initial Veeam repository, which is created automatically during installation.

In future posts, we’ll look in more detail at adding local, CIFS, NFS, and S3 cloud repositories.

For now, we’re ready to create our first SIMPLE backup job.