How does backing up a SAN impact licensing?

[tehinternet]

In the past when I've tried to backup a large, multi-TeraByte file server, in Veeam that would eat much more than one license instance. Each 250 GB ate up one instance, so to backup up one VM of ours it would have needed to eat 35 of our 40 instances.

The above history was for a VM based file server. What about pointing Veeam to a SAN of ours to backup all of the data (again multi-TB) on that? Can I expect it to eat one instance (like a typical VM would) or would it just blow out allotment of instances out of the water and require multiple license instances?

EDIT: For clarity, we're on licensing from a few years back. Not socket-based perpetual. I think VM-based subscription. I understand licensing might have changed since then. So I am curious on the impact of backing up this SAN now, and post-license renewal with whatever licensing model us used now.

[Mildur]

Hi Mike

It depends on what type of backup job you are using. The 250GB per instance was doubled in V11.

- A vm backup job will require 1 instance (VUL) per VM

- An agent backup job will require 1 instance (VUL) per agent running in Server edition

- A file share backup job will require 1 instance (VUL) per 500GB source data you protect

What type of data is on the SAN? VMs? What source data do you want to backup?

Thanks
Fabian

[vmtech123]

Had this issue myself with my 30TB and 40TB file servers.. I'd love to do file based backup as our change rate is in the MB or a few GB a day. but I have to run a backup job.
1VUL vs 60 or 80 VUL per server.

Socket based licensing allows me so many more servers to be backed up on our infrastructure. We have pretty beefy servers we just upgraded so they were underutilized at the time we renewed. Had I been offered the 7:1 ratio I would have bit, but it was more like 3:1 based on our current hardware. In the 5 year term we bought it for near the end we will be closer to the 7:1.

The one selling point for VUL would be file to tape, but based on that example, it's never going to happen for us.

You say SAN, but do you mean NAS? SAN could be a windows file server where you can just do a backup job and use 1 VUL