Earlier this year at VeeamON 2021 we made a significant new product announcement which was the unveiling of Veeam Backup for Red Hat Virtualization. This has now been released a v1.0 Public Beta (Build 1.0.1488). The intent and direction of this release means that we will have supportability for a fourth hyper-visor, meaning that we will cover VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and RHV.

Veeam Backup for Red Hat Virtualization (Veeam Backup for RHV) is an additional component of Veeam Backup & Replication responsible for protection and disaster recovery tasks for Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) hosts. Veeam Backup for RHV integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication version 11a (starting from build 11.01.1261 and later) allowing you to back up RHV VMs to Veeam backup repositories.

Backup for RHV is an agentless approach to back up RHV virtual machines. The following operations are available in the v1.0 release.

  • Create backups of RHV VMs and store them in Veeam Backup & Replication repositories.
  • Restore VMs from backups.
  • Restore VM disks from backups.

Released as Supported Beta:

Important Beta Support Info:
Support for this Public Beta release will be provided to all customers with a valid support contract for other Veeam products.
Again, just to reinforce the point… at this state we are releasing this v1.0 as a supported beta. This was done for a number of reasons, but in a nutshell we wanted to ensure that we released for a narrowly focused set of supported platform versions. I gave some initial thoughts around RHV and how it’s positioned today in the market in an earlier post and it must be pointed out here that we are only supporting very specific versions of RHV and oVirt Engine. In this, we are not officially supporting all variants of KVM for the moment. That said, I have been running this on CentOS, Ubuntu and Rocky Linux with KVM enabled and oVirt for testing. In that, I would encourage those looking to test out a backup solution for KVM to give this a try and report back any issues or general feedback.

Base Requirements:

Again, to narrow official supportability for this initial beta release there is a strict set of requirements for supportability.

  • Veeam Backup & Replication 11a (build 11.0.1.1261) or newer.
  • Red Hat Virtualization 4.4.8 or newer.
  • Full forward and reverse DNS resolution of
    • Veeam Backup & Replication,
    • Veeam Backup for RHV,
    • Red Hat Virtualization manager (oVirt)
    • All RHEV hosts.

We will take advantage of Change Block Tracking needed for optimized, backup and recovery of RHV…this in fact being the missing part of the puzzle that we needed from Red Hat to move forward with this release.

First Look and Walkthrough:

As first see at VeeamOn Update last week, here is a very quick walkthrough demo of Backup for RHV.

More Reading and References

For a what’s new and further reading, use the links below.

Veeam Help Center: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbrhv/userguide/overview.html?ver=10
Release Notes: https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_for_rhv_1_0_release_notes_en_rn.pdf
User Guide: Veeam Backup for RHV 1.0 User Guide
Download: Veeam Backup for Red Hat Virtualization Public Beta: Download