Allow unlicensed agents to consume instances - Greyed out on Community Edition

[daesiku]

I recently pointed several Veeam Agents (both Windows and Linux) at a Community Edition B&R server, and their licenses switched to "Workstation" and began throwing an error about expired licenses after a week or so. The B&R server was still reporting 10 available licenses, and the agents were obviously failing all backup jobs. I resolved the agent issues by creating protection groups and deploying right from the B&R server, but I can't seem to find any reason why the option to Allow unlicensed agents to consume instances is greyed out, or why they wouldn't have simply pulled an available license from the server. I assume it's a Community Edition specific thing, as I haven't had this issue on any of my production installs.

For reference, here are some details around the agent deployment. Nothing new I am sure, but reiterates the requirement to have the admin$ share available on Windows clients.
veeam-agent-for-windows-f33/license-exp ... 63167.html

[Dima P.]

Hello daesiku,

When agent is pointed to Veeam B&R Community Edition it should automatically start to consume the licences available at B&R side (so it's not possible to keep those agents in Free mode, thus the option to disable the license distribution is disabled).

began throwing an error about expired licenses after a week or so. The B&R server was still reporting 10 available licenses, and the agents were obviously failing all backup jobs

This behavior does not look expected since you had some free instances available. Any change you can share a case ID for this issue? Cheers!

[daesiku]

Dima,
That was my thought too. This is in a lab environment, and there is no support on any of the gear or services. It's all just used to test Veeam features and functionality, and I figured I would begin sharing some of what I see in the community (since this forum has helped me countless times). I have 1 other Win10 box that hasn't been redeployed to that I am going to troubleshoot and see if I can make it pull a license without needing to do a re-deploy, but I already spent a few hours seeing if I could trick it into behaving. (Including trying to tell the local agent to remove the license).

I can try to reproduce the problem on a production instance though by installing VAW standalone on a machine, and seeing if it pulls a license.

[jmmarton]

You can still open a support ticket with the free Community Edition.

Joe

[daesiku]

Thanks Joe. I will circle back and open a support ticket when I have some time.

As an update to the underlying issue with the agents all suddenly reporting their licenses had expired, I think it may have had something to do with the user accounts they were using to access the Veeam B&R Server. When I was doing some troubleshooting today on the Windows agents that were still failing, I noticed that I couldn't run through the setup wizard, and it failed at the authentication step. I re-entered the password on both sides (the user on the B&R Sever, and in the Veeam Agent), and it worked. Further review leads me to suspect that the passwords on the user accounts had all expired (which would make sense since all of the jobs and devices were deployed at the same time). I reset all the passwords, and reconfigured all of the user accounts to never expire and then I was able to roll through the wizard. The error in the job was that the license had expired, but I am curious if that was just how the agent interpreted it's new inability to pull a license because of the expired password.

I will open a ticket concerning the box being greyed out and report back my findings.