When you add a Veeam proxy to the Veeam Backup infrastructure, in some cases you can have an error message like this: “Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$”

And the proxy is not added to the infrastructure.

There can be different reason, but the most common case occour when you have proxyes that are “workgroup only” and when you are using dedicated local accounts, and not the “Administrator” one. And you have Windows Server 2012 or later.

The reason is the Microsoft User Account Control (UAC) feature added in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 and later OSes that does not permit non interactive installation (and Veeam install the different components in an unattended way).

It happens if the user is not the local Administrator, and it needs to “elevate” it’s privileges with UAC (also if the user is already in the Administrators group).

This was explained well in the Veeam ADO course (at least the first edition), with the hint of setup a GPO to to disable UAC on all VM’s with Application-aware processing enabled; because the same issues happens also for application-aware processing.

But if the computer is not in an AD domain? In this case you have to manually modify the registry as explained in How to disable UAC remote restrictions.

You can disable it with the following reg key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.

Create a DWORD value called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and assign it a value of 1.

After a reboot the system will be work correctly. Note that the reboot is not needed to apply the regedit changes.

For more information see also Veeam KB 4185: “Access is Denied.” When Using a Local Account to Add a Windows Machine to Veeam Backup & Replication