Today’s Veeam Tip is indeed quick, but it took me some time to figure out… if you are already using, or planning to use, Microsoft Azure resources from your on-premises Veeam Backup & Replication installation using a HTTP(S) Proxy (that is, using an indirect connection to the internet), you could find this post useful!

The issue

After selecting your deployment model (both the old ARM and the new ASM are supported), while adding an Azure subscription to Veeam B&R, the operation fails with a timeout error:

This happens because Veeam B&R cannot reach Azure’s management endpoint over HTTP / HTTPS.

The issue persists even if you correctly specify your proxy settings within Windows, using the standard Internet Explorer / Edge options panel. Specifying settings via netsh commands for WinHTTP doesn’t help either.

The reason

The issue occurs when both the following conditions are met:

Veeam B&R services run under the local “SYSTEM” account (default option during installation)
An HTTP / HTTPS proxy is being used

The tricky part here is that you can easily specify proxy settings for the user you are logged in with – but those settings are never “picked up” by Veeam B&R since it uses the local SYSTEM account to run its services.

Even trickier: there is no obvious way of modifying proxy settings for the local SYSTEM account, since you never log on to Windows with that user.

The solution

Luckily, once the problem is identified, the “fix” is very simple.

You actually have two ways of setting up an HTTP / HTTPS proxy:

Using psexec (part of the great SysInternals Suite by Mark Russinovich) to launch Internet Explorer impersonating the local SYSTEM account and then specify proxy settings:
```
psexec -i -s “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”
```
Specifying proxy settings for the local SYSTEM via registry keys, as described in this article

So, there you have it! I’m going to end this quick post here,

As usual, I hope it’s useful… and any comments are welcome!