AMD EPYC Processors and Socket licencing

[Estrelo]

Hello everyone.

I'm running Veeam with per-socket licencing to protect several Hyper-V Clusters. We just got a couple of 2 socket AMD Servers with 2 EPYC 7F52. Everything works fine, but apparently Windows Server 2019 sees the servers as having 4 sockets. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -rome-proc)
Your licencing refers to physical sockets, not "imagined-by-Microsoft" sockets, so is there any way to solve this that does not involve disabling SMT?

Case # 04550658

Anyone else ran into this issue?

[Gostev]

Can you please help me to track down this statement in our licensing documentation you're talking about:
Your licencing refers to physical sockets, not "imagined-by-Microsoft" sockets.

Because this is not a new issue at all, there were similar scenarios even 10 years ago, and all such statements should really be saying "as reported by the hypervisor".

[Estrelo]

Hey Gostev, thanks for the quick reply.
So in this instance unless I get MS to fix the reporting I have no solution on Veeam's end?

[Gostev]

Yes, basically it's the well known limitation of our socket-based licensing. This is just how the product works by design, so I need to ensure any licensing documentation out there matches this. We have to rely on the hypervisor to determine the number of physical sockets because unlike the operating system, Veeam Backup & Replication does not have the direct access to server's hardware.

[Gostev]

I did some digging and looks like our Licensing Policy already explains this limitation:

1.6. Licensed Object
Socket | An occupied motherboard CPU socket (as reported by the hypervisor API) on hosts with virtual machines (VMs) to be backed up, replicated, monitored or reported on.

[Estrelo]

I disabled SMT to fix it for now...