Veeam Agent Recovery Media Boot Integration

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–Updated 7/26/2024–

During the last Veeam Vanguard/Veeam 100 summit in Prague, Czech Republic part of the summit was “Fun field facts” where attendees presented various topics they found useful for sharing. I presented on how to integrate Veeam Agent into Windows. This will be a short follow-up post on how to incorporate the Veeam Agent Recovery Media into Windows Boot Manager.

I started my presentation in Prague with “When it rains, it pours…” and, after being in IT for many years now, that is what happens. Just like Murphey’s Law; so imagine this, you have a physical workload backed up with Veeam (great), and the OS crashes. You need to restore to bare metal as fast as possible. But now you need to create the recovery media first, boot up the server with a USB drive (need to be physically present); all this can cost valuable time that could be used better to actually do the restore.

A better way is to integrate the recovery media directly into Windows Boot Manager. If you have a KVM, you don’t even need to be at the Datacenter to restore. Integration is surprisingly straightforward and will work with UEFI Bios of course. I don’t think this will work with secure boot though, so you would have to deactivate this first.

Let’s do it.

First great an ISO with Veeam Agent Recovery Media, including all specific drivers and network configuration needed. This will ensure we don’t even have to worry about re-iping the server or any drive issues. NIC and Storage drives should be working out of the box. In case of a more unique hardware configuration, this is the time to load additional drivers into the package.

Next, let’s create a new partition on the server. We will copy the content of the ISO there; it does not need to be very large.

Give it a letter and unpack the ISO into it so it looks like this:

Next, we will integrate it into Windows Boot Manager. I used EasyBCD, but you could use BCDEdit command line as well

Type is Windows and point it to the drive where we unpacked the Veeam Recovery Manager and the boot.wim under /sources. The entry should look like this:

That’s it. Now you can quickly boot into Veeam Recovery and restore the OS. No need to re-ip the machine or get a usb drive connected!

–Updated 7/26/2024–

I had shared this post last Friday, since it came in very handy during the global Crowdstrike outage. There a a few small changes/improvements to this procedure:

• EasyBCD 2.4 will not run on a server operating system without a pro license. This caused an issue in my homelab running a server. I didn’t want to buy a license for this, so the solution is to use EasyBCD 2.3, which does not have this check. 2.3 works without issues on server, I tested this up to Server 2022. I linked it here for you.
• If you can’t or don’t want to change your partition layout, you can copy the boot.wim into a folder on your root drive and point the bootmanager to that. I tested this with UEFI boot, but should work with legacy, iso boot as well. No need to fool with partitions.