Veeam Backup for Proxmox VE - Workers

Veeam Backup for Proxmox VE uses Workers to backup Proxmox VMs in the same way as Veeam Backup & Replication uses Proxy Servers for vSphere VMs. Every worker will process VM data when transferring data to and from backup repositories.

Transport Mode

When a Backup job starts, a VM snapshot will be created. The worker will read the data from the snapshot and send this data to the backup repository.

Once the snapshot is created, the worker can get the VM data in two ways:

If the worker is running in the same Proxmox host as the VM you want to backup, the snapshot will be attached directly to the worker using the Hot-Add mode.
If there is no worker running on the Proxmox host where the protected VM is running, any other worker in the Proxmox cluster will be used. In this case, the worker will use the network connection between Proxmox hosts (NBD Mode) to get the VM data.

Plase note that Hot-Add mode potentially provides a better performance than NBD Mode when running a backup job. Therefore, it would be recommended to deploy at least one worker per Proxmox host in order to use Hot-Add mode when running a backup Job.

In case you choose to deploy workers in specific Proxmox hosts, and leverage the NBD Mode for backups, make sure the connection between hosts provide the proper througput for the data transferring during backup or restore operations.

Worker sizing

Workers sizing depends on the number of concurrent tasks, requiring 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM for every concurrent asks. In addition, the worker requires 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM for other internal tasks.

Please consider that for Veeam Backup for Proxmox VE, a concurrent tasks is a concurrent VM being processed, regardless the number of virtual disks.

For more information, please refer to the System Requirement section in the Veeam Backup for Proxmox VE documentation

Veeam Backup for Proxmox VE - Workers

Transport Mode

Worker sizing

References