Installation

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

This article describes how to install the Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin.

Prerequisites

The Bacula File Daemon and the IRIS Plugin need to be installed on a host where the target instances are accessible and where the IRIS binaries are available.
The plugin must be deployed on a host running Linux. It is possible to use any of the supported Linux distributions of Bacula Enterprise, including RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
The plugin works via a Java daemon, therefore Java needs to be installed into the host using a JRE or JDK package (openjdk-11-jre, for example). The Java environment should be version 11 or higher, and the Java binary must be accessible in the system PATH.
The memory and computational requirements can vary significantly based on the configuration and usage of the plugin, such as parallelization and backup data size. It is recommended to have a minimum of 4GB RAM on the server where the File Daemon runs. By default, each job may use up to 512 MB of RAM in demanding scenarios, although it is typically less. In certain cases, this could be higher. Memory limits can be adjusted (see: Out of memory).
To communicate with IRIS and fetch data, proper permissions for the backup user are required. Details about how to configure those permissions are covered in the configuration section.

Installation Methods

Result

The installation package includes the following components:

JAR libraries in /opt/bacula/lib (such as bacula-iris-plugin-x.x.x.jar and bacula-iris-plugin-libs-x.x.x.jar). Note that the version of these JAR archives is not aligned with the package version. However, the JAR version is shown in the job log, for example: “Jar version: X.X.X”.
A plugin connection file (iris-fd.so) in the plugins directory (usually /opt/bacula/plugins).
A backend file (iris-backend) that invokes the JAR files in /opt/bacula/bin. This backend file searches for the most recent bacula-iris-plugin-x.x.x.jar file in order to launch it, even though there should generally be only one file present.

Once the plugin is installed, you can verify it is loaded through a status client command in Bconsole (the Plugin: line must contain iris):

Status client

*st client
Automatically selected Client: 127.0.0.1-fd
Connecting to Client 127.0.0.1-fd at 127.0.0.1:8102

127.0.0.1-fd Version: 18.2.2 (20 Jan 2026)  x86_64-pc-linux-gnu ubuntu 24.04
Daemon started 22-jan-26 10:14. Jobs: run=2 running=0 max=100.
Ulimits: nofile=1024 memlock=2026356736 status=ok
Heap: heap=827,392 smbytes=436,939 max_bytes=5,100,087 bufs=153 max_bufs=248
Sizes: boffset_t=8 size_t=8 debug=600 trace=1 mode=1,2010 bwlimit=0kB/s
Crypto: fips=no crypto=OpenSSL 3.0.2 15 Mar 2022
APIs: !GPFS
Plugin: bpipe(2)iris(1.0.0)