Questions about Community Edition Licensing

[MWodziczko]

Hi!
I hope it's correct place to get an answer about this issue.
My company provides IT services for around 150 clients, which don't have local IT Administrators. Most of our clients are small and are facing financial restraints but also need a good backup solution. We managed to implement Veeam Data Platform Essentials for a few of them.

Q1.
Now we're wondering about using Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition for some cases, but are not sure if we wont be breaking licensing agreement.
Excerpt from EULA : You may not use the Free and Community Edition Licenses to provide services to third parties (including support and consulting services for existing Free and Community Edition License installations)
We wouldn't collect additional payment for it but would be acting as IT department on behalf of our client.
Can our clients use Community Edition in this case?

Q2.
I've started wondering about this after recent project implemented by a big company included installation of Veeam Community Edition to backup servers included in a project.
Is what they did legal?

Q3.
Additionally I don't fully understand how instances are used. Is there a difference between Community Edition and Essentials in how many instances are used for serveres/workstation or virtual/physical machine? From article https://www.veeam.com/blog/backup-repli ... ption.html
1.(with limits for protecting up to 10 instances – where workstations consume 1 instance and servers 3 instances each)
2.you gain Standard edition functionality with Community Edition for up to 10 VMs
In mentioned in Q2 project (I have access to this instance of Veeam Community Edition) there are 6 virtual machines - 4x Windows Server 2022 and 2x Ubuntu Servers - each of them are using a single instances. After reading this article I would assume that it would need 18 instances. Or there is no difference what virtual machine role is and they always use one instance? Than difference in number of instances between workstation and servers is only regarding physical machines? Are these the same rules as in Essentials?

[Mildur]

Hello MWodziczko

Welcome to the forum.
Let me answer your questions.

Q1: No, your <clients> cannot use the community edition if you are <acting as IT department for them>.
Using our free products to provide any service to a third party is not allowed by our EULA. I assume you don't provide them a complete free services (backup monitoring, implementation, updating the backup server, solving backup issues) without ever getting paid anything.
The client must either use his own license (VUL) or he can be licensed through a Service Providers Rental license.
What you can do to get access to the rental license: Register yourself as a Veeam Certified Service Provider, get a rental license and license those customers with it.
Rental licensing is a license especially for service providers to provide backup services to their customers. They are billed monthly by Veeam. There is no minimum amount of licenses you need to subscribe too. If a client of yours has only 1 machine to protect, you can generate a license for a single machine just for this client.
When using the rental license, you need to deploy our Service Provider Console together with a Veeam Cloud Connect server. Our Service Provider Console allows you to monitor all your clients backup servers from a single interface. And the license usage for your monthly mandatory reporting to Veeam. There are many more functionalities available in the Service Provider Console which are enabling your to provide services to your clients.

Q2: No. Implementation services are not allowed with the community edition. This deployment must be licensed.

Q3: Community Edition and Essentials VUL have the same instance consumption for workloads. 1 VM will always consume 1 instance. It doesn't matter which role or application is installed on a VM.

Best,
Fabian