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Automating Veeam Agent for Linux deployment with Ansible

Mass installing Veeam Agents for Linux? Make it Ansible do it for you!

Veeam Data Platform 12.3 dropped with Deployer Service and option to switch communication between nodes to certificates generated by VBR. This is massive improvement and makes VAL management so much easier from the centralized VBR console rather than per agent configuration. I won't be going into details of configuring Protection Groups and jobs here, because it's all in the docs. Also some pieces of the pre-configuration steps will also direct to the official documentation.

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Playbook is made for RHEL systems, if you use Debian derivatives adjust it to your system.

Prerequisites:

What does the playbook do?

  • Remove all current Veeam packages from the system.
  • Upload prepared deployer kit to the destination system.
  • Unzip, install packages, install certificate and restart deployer service (no system reboot is needed).

So, basically, if you look at Deployer Service manual playbook does Steps 3-5 for you. Great thing if you have multiple servers to install and/or you're going from Agent managed to VBR managed jobs.

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If you regenerate deployer kit on the VBR server, old deployer keys are invalidated. It's not really mentioned in the docs, but that's what happened when I did it accidentally during testing.

The actuals:

  1. Copy the generated kit to your Ansible server, we will use it in the playbook.
  2. Get and run the playbook:

Once the playbook run is complete you can onboard agent to Veeam B&R (step 6.) and complete job setup.

Hope it helps!