Support for RHEL 8, CentOS 8 or Rocky Linux 8? Including Rocky Linux 9

Released in May of 2019, when is support for these 2 OS's happening?

CentOS 7 & RHEL 7 become unsupported in 4.5 years and that's the latest you support. Makes things very difficult when we build new machines that are expected to go 5 years out.

For those that have tried. The RHEL 7 agent installs on 8 but can't be loaded into the new 4.18+ kernels.

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  • I hear ya, it is. Always have to make sure all your 3rd party tools support the 'new' stuff before you upgrade. Sucks, but it is a reality. Just a question though, are these VMs? If so, you can use agent-less backups to protect these OSs and not have to play the game of OS level/agent version. 

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  • Yes, but I have the agent on the host machine so agentless backups don't work. I have to remove the agent from the host first. I only did 1 machine so far and it is part of a cluster so not too concerned yet....but this is holding up 5 other machines.

  • I think I follow. I'm assuming you're referring to a Hyper-V cluster yeah? If so the part I don't follow is the agent on the host so agent-less doesn't work. Are you backing up the host itself? If so, then yes you can't back up the host and then use the host for agent-less. Which is why the host should just be a host and nothing more (normally). If it's agent-less for Hyper-V though, you MUST have the agent on the host in order for it work (I only say that as you mentioned removing the agent from the host, and that's the part where I got lost). 

    Only trying to walk through your situation and help out if I can. I do agree with you though, versioning gets to be problematic with any 'new' releases (or newer), just like with Server 2022. Luckily if we're talking VMs there are ways around this. If you have ESXi then no agents are needed, if you have Hyper-V an agent has to go on each HV host in order to backup the VMs w/o an agent. Regardless of your DP vendor, the agent inside the Hyper-V hosts is needed as there isn't an open API as there is with ESXi. This is exactly how we backup some of the older OSs that Quest no longer supports (and shouldn't) but clients still have for one reason or another. 

  • With VM's aside, If there is no agent on the hyper-v host can you still back up the host?

  • Assuming the Hyper-V host itself is a physical server, no there is not. The only way to backup physical hardware with RR (or with basically any solution I can think of) is with an agent. 

    If your Hyper-V host is embedded inside ESXi or something like that (just saying), then yes you can. 

    The industry as a whole however would tilt toward NOT backing up the host itself, although that assumes its just a host and doesn't provide any additional features/roles other than Hyper-V. The intent is for it to be a drone, and Data Protection as a whole, assumes as though it is.