Hyper-V Standalone to Cluster migration (Licensing)

[cobra]

Hello there dear Community,

I want to migrate my Host (Hyper-V standalone host) to a more reliable/stable solution (Hyper-V cluster with a shared storage).
The shared storage is going to be the place where all the virtual machines will be stored.
The cluster contains two hosts with 2 sockets each - do I have to upgrade my licence to 4 sockets?
Or is it possible to backup only one of my hosts, which would fit my current 2 sockets license?


Best regards

[Shestakov]

Hello,
you need to license hosts, where VMs you backup reside on. If you want to have a cluster of 2 hosts and backup from it, you need to license both hosts.
Please read the licensing FAQ to get more info.
Thanks!

[PTide]

If you add the whole cluster to the console then each host from the cluster will attempt to consume the needed amount of sockets from your license. That is, if the VM that you're trying to backup resides on the host that has not been licensed yet and you're already out of spare sockets, the job will fail.

Thanks

[alanbolte]

Note that changed block tracking won't operate correctly for cluster resources added to the console as part of a standalone host.

[RobinPGI]

On one of my sites I have a 2-CPU host covered by Veeam B&R licences.
I've just added an additional 1-CPU host for resiliency and formed a cluster with the existing 2-CPU host.

All the VMs will run from the 2-CPU host once I change them from standalone VMs to clustered VMs, I'm going to set the 2-CPU host as the preferred owner.

I don't have any requirement to be able to take backups from the new 1-CPU host as this is only there to keep the VMs running during updates/reboots of the main host. The backups will be timed such that they are finished before the main host reboots.

I am concerned that if I add the cluster to Veeam I'll get a licence warning/error. I don't really want to licence the new host as it is only very rarely going to have anything running on it.

I've moved one VM under cluster control and am now getting the following warning during it's backup: "Failed to flush change tracking data. Using full scan incremental run.". The VM had been previously backing up with no issues so I'm fairly sure it is something to do with it now being clustered that's caused this.

Should I reconfigure Veeam to talk to the hosts as a cluster, or just keep the original host configured as a standalone host?

[PTide]

Hi,

Please see the explanation above. Regarding the 'tracking data error" please take a look at this KB article and existing topic for more info.

Thanks