Paid VAW not compatible with VBR Essentials

[O1982]

Hi All,

Can someone confirm this is true:

I need to have physical machine backups with forever forward incrementals (not available in free version).

We paid ~4500€ and then maintenance of about 1500€ for Veeam Backup and Recovery Essentials Enterprise Ed + 3 years of support&updates.

Now I have been told that we need to pay an extra 700-1400€ a year to backup those 5 machines BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE - we need to upgrade our license to a normal Backup and Recovery licence because the licenses are incompatible. And this will of course be MUCH more.

What. The. Hell.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Owen.
I see you have purchased 3 bundles of Veeam Backup Essentials (perpetual per CPU) to protect Hyper-V machines. Perpetual bundle is meant for virtualization only, as physical Agents are subscription model. Veeam Backup Essentials is highly discounted version for small businesses, with a limit of 3 packs(6 sockets total). If additional workloads protection is needed, and upgrade SKU must be purchased as listed under Veeam Licensing Policy. That might be the reason why you have been quoted additional instances pack + upgrade from capped essentials bundle.
However, with your current license you should be able to use 6 agent instances for free(we give 1 instance per CPU socket for free, up to 6 wtih Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 update4 installed).

Answering your question: If VBR Essentials is capped(6 sockets), than yes, to use paid agents within same UI(aka merge licenses), you will have to upgrade Essentials Bundle up.

Thanks!

[O1982]

Hi Egor,

Thanks for taking the time to reply and look at my account info.

So I can apply my VBR Essentials Ent license to 6 VAW installs to achieve paid functionality (and therefore set the physical agent job as forever forward incremental)? The agents currently say the Free license is managed by the backup server - do I have to uninstall and then re-install and then apply the main VBR license?

Or did I misunderstand?

Best Regards,

Owen

[Egor Yakovlev]

You don't have to do anything special with licenses on VBR server, nor on agents - your per-CPU license has gifted instances in it by default and will apply required instances to agents automatically when you start backing them up.
- make sure your Veeam Backup and Replication server has Update4 installed. Gifted instances unlocked by that update.
- free\unmanaged agents cannot utilize gifted instances license and must be switched to managed by VBR server mode, that is, they must be added under Inventory - Physical Infrastructure, either to "Manually Added" default protection group or to any custom protection group you can create there.

If those 2 conditions are met, your VBR server will be able to deploy agents and apply gifted instances to them automatically, with instance count depending on edition you choose under Backup Job(Server\Workstation agent functionality). Update, add machines to VBR Inventory, create backup!

/Cheers!