Zamaan's Tech Blogs

With the latest release of v13 Software Appliance, Anton Gostev (Chief Product Officer) has commented the following “The following features will not be available in new V13 installation and/or for newly create jobs in the upgraded installations, however will continue to work for upgraded installations and/or in the existing jobs using these features. They will then be removed completely in V14. The main idea behind this approach is that we can potentially delay discontinuation of some feature in case we missed a critical use case (until we address this use case).”

I’ve added some further commentary to his announcement in January 2025 when he released this in the Veeam R&D forum.

Veeam Backup & Replication
1. Reversed incremental backup mode.

2. Backup job retention based on the number of restore points (only time-based retention will be available).

3. Non per-machine backup chains (only per-machine backup chains will be available)

4. Active Directory based authentication for Veeam Cloud Connect tenants.

5. Restore options when double-clicking on VBK/VBM in Windows Explorer. – Double-clicking a VBK or VBM file in Windows Explorer opens the Veeam Backup browser, allowing you to select a restore point and perform various restores, including guest file restore for file-level recovery or entire VM restore for recovering a full virtual machine, depending on the context and your installed Veeam product. The specific options that appear depend on the backup’s target and the configuration of your Veeam environment. 

6. Sequential tape processing option (parallel processing will be a default behaviour with automated failover to sequential tape processing when single drive is available).

Veeam Agents
1. Import/Export configuration to/from XML

2. Retention based on the number of restore points (only time-based retention will be available).

3. The ability to burn Recovery Media to CD / DVD.

Discontinued Features
Upgrade to V13 will be blocked in presence of the following:
1. Jobs with backup metadata still not upgraded to V12 format.
2. Backup Copy jobs still in legacy mode.
3. Full Veeam Agent for Windows installs prior to V6 (with LocalDB configuration database).
4. Veeam Cloud Connect Portal
5. Universal Application-Item Recovery (U-AIR)

System Requirements
System requires has also changed so it would be worthwhile reviewing the requirements for v13.

Global
Dropping 32-bit OS support in all features and functionality.

Protected Infrastructure

Application-aware processing for virtual machines
Application-consistent backups with application-aware processing will be supported for 64-bit guest OS only (crash-consistent host-level VM backup remains possible regardless of guest OS type).
Windows Server: dropping support for Windows Server 2008 and 2012. Minimum supported version for application-aware processing is 2012 R2.
Windows Client: dropping support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. Minimum supported versions for application-aware processing of Windows 10 are 1507 for LTSB/LTSC channels and 22H2 for GA channel. Minimum supported version for Windows 11 is 22H2.
Linux: same as Veeam Agent for Linux below.

VMware vSphere
vSphere: dropping support for version 6.x; minimum supported version is 7.0 for both ESXi and vCenter.
vCloud Director: dropping support for versions through 10.3; minimum supported version is 10.4

Microsoft Hyper-V
Hyper-V: dropping support for 2012 and 2012 R2 ; minimum supported version is 2016.
SCVMM: dropping support for SCVMM 2012; minimum supported version is 2016.

Nutanix AHV
AHV: dropping support for versions 5.x, 6.0 and 6.1; minimum supported version is 6.8.

oVirt KVM
No changes.

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows
Windows Server: dropping support for Windows Server 2008 and 2012, minimum supported version is 2012 R2
Windows Client: dropping support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. Minimum supported versions of Windows 10 are 1507 for LTSB/LTSC channels and 22H2 for GA channel. Minimum supported version for Windows 11 is 22H2.

Veeam Agent for Linux
CentOS: dropping support completely.
Debian: dropping support for Debian 10; minimum supported version is Debian 11.
Fedora: dropping support completely.
openSUSE: dropping support completely.
RHEL: dropping support for RHEL 7, RHEL 8.0 through 8.3; minimum supported version is 8.4.
Oracle Linux: no changes; minimum supported version remains Oracle Linux 7.
SLES: dropping support of older SLES 12 service packs; minimum supported versions are 12 SP5, 15 SP3 or later.
Ubuntu: no changes; supported versions are 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS.
Rocky: 8.10 support remains. Dropping support for 9.0 to 9.3; minimum supported version is 9.4
Alma: 8.10 support remains. Dropping support for 9.3; minimum supported version is 9.4

Veeam Agent for Mac
Dropping support for 10.13 through 10.15 ; minimum supported version is 11.

Veeam Agent for Oracle Solaris
Dropping support for 11.0 through 11.2 ; supported versions are 10, 11.3, 11.4

Protected Applications

Microsoft Exchange Server
Dropping support for Exchange 2013; minimum supported version is Exchange 2016.

Microsoft SharePoint Server
Dropping support for SharePoint 2013; minimum supported version is SharePoint 2016.

Microsoft SQL Server
Dropping support for SQL Server 2008; minimum supported version is SQL Server 2012.

Oracle
Likely no changes; will keep 11gR2 as a minimum supported version (customers are always very slow to upgrade Oracle).

SAP HANA
Dropping support for version 1.0; minimum supported version is 2.0.

OS distributions for application plug-ins
Minimum supported OS versions:
IBM Db2: RHEL 8.4, SLES 12 SP5, SLES 15 SP3, Ubuntu 16.04, CentOS 8
Microsoft SQL Server: Windows 2012 R2
Oracle RMAN: Windows 2012 R2, RHEL 8.4, Oracle Linux 7, SLES 12 SP5, SLES 15 SP3
SAP HANA: RHEL 8.4, SLES 12 SP5, SLES 15 SP3
SAP on Oracle: RHEL 8.4, SLES 12 SP5, SLES 15 SP3, Oracle Linux 7

Backup Infrastructure

Backup Server, Backup Console and Enterprise Manager
Windows Server: dropping support for Server 2012 and 2012 R2; minimum supported version is Server 2016.
Windows Client: minimum supported versions for Windows 10 are 21H2 for LTSC channel and 22H2 for GA channel. Minimum supported version for Windows 11 is 22H2.
Linux: special version of Rocky 9.2 (provided and managed by Veeam)
SQL Server: dropping support for SQL Server 2012 and 2014; minimum supported version is SQL Server 2016.
PostgreSQL: no changes
Browsers: no changes

Backup Infrastructure Components (proxies, repositories, gateways, accelerators etc.)
Windows Server: dropping support for Server 2012 and 2012 R2; minimum supported version is Server 2016.
Windows Client: minimum supported versions for Windows 10 are 21H2 for LTSC channel and 22H2 for GA channel. Minimum supported version for Windows 11 is 22H2.
CentOS: dropping support completely.
Debian: dropping support for Debian 10; minimum supported version is Debian 11.
RHEL: dropping support for RHEL 7, RHEL 8.0 through 8.5; minimum supported version is RHEL 8.6 (excluding expired non-LTS releases).
Oracle Linux: no changes; minimum supported version remains Oracle Linux 7 .
SLES: dropping support of older SLES 12 service packs; minimum supported versions are 12 SP5, 15 SP3 or later.
Ubuntu: dropping support for 18.04 LTS; supported versions are 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS.
Alma: dropping support completely.
Rocky: special version of Rocky 9.2 (provided and managed by Veeam); for vanilla Rocky minimum supported version is 9.4 or later.

Backup repositories
Integration through run-time data mover is discontinued, only persistent data mover (a V11 feature) is supported going forward.

Primary Storage Infrastructure

Dropping legacy storage families and OS versions due to EOL/EOS by vendors and in coordination with them:
Dell: dropping support for all VNX, VNX2, VNXe versions.
NetApp: dropping support for all ONTAP 7-mode versions.
NetApp: dropping support for ONTAP cluster-mode versions 9.1 through 9.6; minimum supported version is 9.7.
Cisco: minimum supported version is 5.0(2x).
HPE: dropping support for all StoreVirtual (formerly LeftHand/P4000 Series) and StoreVirtual VSA versions.
IBM: dropping support for Spectrum Virtualize OS versions 8.2 through 8.3; minimum supported version is 8.4.

Published: September 18, 2025 3:12pm