Veeam ONE License problem/suggestion

[VTsnow]

With VAS per-socket licensing, you use the same license file for B&R and ONE. IN B&R, you can choose which Host workloads to license and manage. The allows you to partially/selectively protect an environment. Whereas in ONE, the only way (that I've found) to selectively apply the license is by choosing which datastores and VM's are monitored; the option to control this by host is missing. This means that if your vCenter has more sockets in it than you want to monitor, you're kind of out of luck.

For example: Let's say I have 2 clusters, each with 10 total sockets, for a total of 20 total sockets. If I have a license for 10VAS sockets, in B&R I can choose to license one of these clusters, and have the other be unmanaged. No problems, no warnings.
This same mechanism doesn't exist in ONE, so the minute I connect vCenter, my license has exceeded it's limit. Even if the service account is set to "no access" for the second cluster in vCenter, it still errors, meaning this data must just be pulling from vCenter statistics, rather than intelligently managing the workload.

If both solutions will use the same license, there should be a similar mechanism to control how it's used. The solution in B&R is flexible and means that you can get creative with Hosts and it would be really nice to have this in ONE
OR if I'm missing something glaringly obvious, I'd love to know how to handle this situation.

Thanks in advance. Be well
Scott

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Scott,

Have you considered using "By Location" as an exclusion rule? Also, since Veeam ONE is a monitoring tool, it consumes licenses as soon as you register objects in the infrastructure. And this is correct. BTW, Veeam B&R does the same, actually, but only when you start processing/backing up the VM (in Veeam ONE's world it is equal to the start of monitoring).

Hope it helps!

[VTsnow]

Hi Vitaly,
Thanks for the response.
Because the service account has no access, it can't even see the second cluster or host objects to exclude it. I understand what you mean about it being a monitoring tool, but given that there are ways to make exclusions, you should be able to exclude host objects and not have them count against the licenses. Same as with B&R.
Thanks again!

[VTsnow]

Interesting update.
So to recap the service account user has no visibility to ClusterB, which I do not want to monitor.

This is a new build, so I removed the vCenter server registration in ONE. After a reboot, I re-added the same vCenter server. It does not count the sockets from ClusterB at the point, so this is a viable if clunky workaround. It's only really viable for a new server however, as removal of vCenter, causes historic data to be lost.

I'll go back to my original ask, I think it would be a really handy feature to be able to choose which workloads you want to monitor. I could see this helping in a multi-tenant situation, or in my situation as a SMB, I'd like to selectively choose my workloads to save on licensing costs.
Scott

[Vitaliy S.]

Ah, so you cannot exclude VMs, because your account does not have permissions for the entire VI, let me ask our QA team to confirm that.

I think it would be a really handy feature to be able to choose which workloads you want to monitor. I could see this helping in a multi-tenant situation, or in my situation as a SMB, I'd like to selectively choose my workloads to save on licensing costs.

You can do that, but the account registering the vCenter Server should have permissions to objects you want to exclude data collection for. Can you please elaborate a bit more on the use case with a limited vCenter Server account?

[VTsnow]

I have one higher priority cluster that I want to monitor.
I have one lower priority cluster that I do not want to monitor.

Based on what you posted initially, if ONE simply sees that a HOST exists in that vCenter, it counts against socket count. This is not very flexible. My workaround is simply because I want my ONE setup to match what I have in B&R - high value workload protected, low value workload not protected.

[William Bohn]

I'd like to chime in that it is very impossible to understand what Veeam ONE is counting for its instances. Is it a problem to add a Hyper-V host and also a Veeam B&R server? Does that basically double the instances since you are seeing the same stuff but one is from the VM host monitoring side and the other is the same VMs but on the backup side?

It seems we have to pick one or the other? With all the reports in Veeam Reporter, how about a detailed report on what is counting as licensed items?

[William Bohn]

Just to add to my above post, it seems with Essentials Edition, you get VeeamONE included with your license but you can't use it completely since you will run out of licenses. For our example, our client has 30 instances:
15 VMs on one host Hyper-V server
1 Physical system
14 in NAS instances

When adding the host Hyper-V to Veeam One we see the license count be 15 of 30 which is normal. It is counting the 15 VMs being monitored.
Then when adding the Veeam B&R server the count jumps to 44 of 30. So we are counting VMs twice. One to monitor their VM performance and the other for their backup jobs. That means you can never use VeeamONE fully and not go over the limit.

[Vitaliy S.]

Based on what you posted initially, if ONE simply sees that a HOST exists in that vCenter, it counts against socket count. This is not very flexible.

Yes, and in order to address your scenario, you can register the entire vCenter Server with read-only permission and then exclude objects you don't want to monitor based on their location. B&R does absolutely the same thing, but only when it starts processing the backed up VM. In the case of Veeam ONE processing = start of monitoring.

I'd like to chime in that it is very impossible to understand what Veeam ONE is counting for its instances. Is it a problem to add a Hyper-V host and also a Veeam B&R server?

Acutally, it is quite easy. Let me give you an example: Veeam ONE consumes a license key for everything you protect with Veeam B&R registered in Veeam ONE. Additionally, it consumes licenses for monitored VMs (vSphere/Hyper-V). If the same VM is both protected and monitored, then only 1 license key is consumed. No double-charging.

Does that basically double the instances since you are seeing the same stuff but one is from the VM host monitoring side and the other is the same VMs but on the backup side?

No, it does not. For example, if you have 10 VMs you want to monitor and back up, then you need only 10 instances. This license key will need to be installed in both Veeam B&R and Veeam ONE.

It seems we have to pick one or the other? With all the reports in Veeam Reporter, how about a detailed report on what is counting as licensed items?

You don't need to pick one or another. License is consumed only once by every workload protected with Veeam B&R and monitored by Veeam ONE. If you have some extra VMs you monitor with Veeam ONE (and do not protect with Veeam B&R), then these VMs will consume a key from Veeam ONE.

Just to add to my above post, it seems with Essentials Edition, you get VeeamONE included with your license but you can't use it completely since you will run out of licenses. For our example, our client has 30 instances:
15 VMs on one host Hyper-V server
1 Physical system
14 in NAS instances

When adding the host Hyper-V to Veeam One we see the license count be 15 of 30 which is normal. It is counting the 15 VMs being monitored.
Then when adding the Veeam B&R server the count jumps to 44 of 30. So we are counting VMs twice. One to monitor their VM performance and the other for their backup jobs. That means you can never use VeeamONE fully and not go over the limit.

This is not correct, it should 30 out of 30, not 44. I would recommend opening a support case with our team. Once you do this, let me know your case ID for tracking.

[VTsnow]

Hi Vitaliy
While what you say about B&R may be very true on the backend, on the frontend users are provided an easy and flexible way to affect the behavior. This does not exist in ONE, hence my original ask.

Frankly doing this with vcenter permissions isn't a workable solution, as you have to do it at configuration time. To reconfigure you have to remove vcenter, losing all historical data.
If for no other reason, I'd think that Veeam would want to update ONE, as the licensing behavior is inconsistent across products.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Scott,

Frankly doing this with vcenter permissions isn't a workable solution, as you have to do it at configuration time. To reconfigure you have to remove vcenter, losing all historical data.

Just to make sure we are on the same page: why using a single account does not work in your case? Why do you want to register vCenter Server with an account that does not have permissions on all objects?

If you want to address a multi-tenancy use case here, then we already have a solution to that > About Multi-Tenant Monitoring and Reporting

Thanks!

[William Bohn]

Hi Vitaly - I created a case. Case #04560963
It details the issue when adding the backup server to Veeam ONE and the license going way over. I attached a log from Veeam ONE into it.

thanks
-Bill

[Vitaliy S.]

Bill, looks like updating your VAS installation to 10a did fix the issue, right?

[dgcramer5]

We had a case open several months ago with Veeam about this particular issue and really never got to a good resolution with the way Veeam One does the licensing. Veeam One is a very good monitoring tool and also use the reporting of Veeam One for B&R, but with the licensing issues being so cumbersome we are looking for other options. I created all kinds of exclusion rules to try and keep within the licensing requirements, but would end up missing things I wanted to monitor. To compound matters we have a large environment with both Vmware and HyperV and going through a large migration from one hardware platform to another as well as migrating from HyperV to Vmware. We ended up with lots of systems being counted twice. Unfortunately there is no good reporting tool in Veeam One to help with analysis of what is being licensed. You need to do an export of a SQL table and send to support to figure that out. We also found that if you have a host in a cluster that does not have a VM on it, the host will not be monitored. It does not show up in any of the reports.

[Vitaliy S.]

We had a case open several months ago with Veeam about this particular issue and really never got to a good resolution with the way Veeam One does the licensing.

Can you please tell me your case ID?

We also found that if you have a host in a cluster that does not have a VM on it, the host will not be monitored. It does not show up in any of the reports.

With a socket-key the license is indeed consumed, however, this is not the case with VUL. What kind of key did you have?

[VTsnow]

Hi Scott,


Just to make sure we are on the same page: why using a single account does not work in your case? Why do you want to register vCenter Server with an account that does not have permissions on all objects?

If you want to address a multi-tenancy use case here, then we already have a solution to that > About Multi-Tenant Monitoring and Reporting

Thanks!

I'm not sure how to say this differently to get my point across.

I do not want to monitor all objects in vcenter. That's it.

There appears to be no way to configure this without a limited vcenter user account. The licensing on this product is not flexible when it comes to hosts. All I'm asking for is an easier method to control how licenses are applied to hosts. If licenses are sold on a socket basis, you should be able to choose which hosts/sockets consume those licenses.

[Vitaliy S.]

I get that, but to achieve your goal you don't need to use limited scope accounts.

There appears to be no way to configure this without a limited vcenter user account.

All you need to do is register vCenter Server with the account that has permissions to all objects, and then exclude what you don't want to monitor.