File to Tape jobs will start consuming instances

[veehexx]

We upgraded from v11 to v12 last week (along with some licence renewals) and today we've experienced a notification saying "your File to Tape jobs currently protect X TB of source data and will start consuming Y instances in Z days" when starting B&R console.

Our backup structure is Veeam 365 backing up M365 data to a onsite iscsi share. Then use the File to tape job in B&R to backup this iscsi path to AWS Glacier (VTL) to cover the offsite and longer term retention.

I'm guessing this is new to v12 as we've been running this perfectly fine upto now for a number of years without warnings.

aside from the "why has this been working... whats changed?" question, what would be the way to handle this without additional licences? admittedly i havent spent much time looking into this, but maybe reference the same repo from both veeam365 and B&R so veeam considers it 'internal' data and no licence consumption.

[Mildur]

Hi veehexx

Yes, V12 introduced File to Tape licensing. 500GB = 1 license.
Good news, writing Veeam backups do not count against the 500GB File To Tape license.
You don't have to license VB365 db files (adb) written to tape.

Best,
Fabian

[veehexx]

Thats good to know, although i'm sure i'll forget in a year or twos time
Also saved me a bit of time that I don't have to reconfigure things to accomodate the change.

A bit of feedback then: add a 'more information' link on that notifcation box to take you to a KB with more details & an explicit note that .adb files aren't counted and licence exempt.
There could also be some further checks like the message only occurs on affected datasets so scenarios like ours (only 1 'File to Tape' job for exclusive use of Veeam365 data) do not trigger the notifcation.

[Mildur]

Thanks for the feedback. Just in case you didn't know, we have it in our user guide:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

When your files and folders are protected with file backup to tape jobs, Veeam backup files are excluded from instance consumption calculation.

an explicit note that .adb files aren't counted and licence exempt

This is a corner case. Protecting VB365 with a File To Tape Job is not something we see often.
Our recommendation is to use Veeam Agent jobs or VM backup jobs to protect the VB365 server. This Veeam Backup can then be written to tape or offloaded to object storage via capacity tier. Or since V12 direct backup to object storage would also be an option.

[veehexx]

Our recommendation is to use Veeam Agent jobs or VM backup jobs to protect the VB365 server.

I'll look into that but it's not Azure VM's, it's the native services like ExO, SPO etc. Either way, I might as well move to a standard design rather than being an edge case for no reason.

[Mildur]

Your VB365 server will still protect your ExO, SPO, OneDrive Teams data. The Veeam Agent on your VB365 server will then backup the entire V365 server, inclusive the jet databases used as backup repositories on your iSCSI drive. Let's call it a backup copy done by the Veeam Agent instead of using a File To Tape Job.

Benefits:
- You don't have to stop VB365 services while the backup is running
- You can restore the entire VB365 server and it's configuration to an earlier state.
- Integrated with VBR lets you do other cool stuff:
a) Offload only changed data to Object Storage
b) Restore VB365 data from the VBR console
c) Use SureBackup to verify recoverability for your VB365 backups

Best,
Fabian

[walrus2120]

Does this not double the amount of space required? If i use agent, does it not create a new vbk file of the M365 data (which is already on my backup repo), and that then gets put to tape? I use the file to tape job to preserve space.

[sasilik]

Yes, V12 introduced File to Tape licensing. 500GB = 1 license.

Why isn't it mentioned in What's new document? If I would gave upgraded then it would have been bad surprise because our file to tape job is ~35TB big. It was a lucky chance that I found this topic when searching for other information.

[Mildur]

Hi Markko

It's mentioned on page 18:
https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_whats_new_wn.pdf

Backup to tape
Scalable file backup engine — No more struggling with backing up a large number of files
directly to tape with a tape-out engine that’s designed to export a small number of large imagelevel backup files! The new, redesigned file backup engine in V12 was built to scale to billions of
files in petabytes of size which allows you to back up enterprise-scale NAS deployments directly
to tape with confidence. This new capability supports all the same data sources and is licensed in the same way as the existing NAS backup-to-disk functionality

And in our upgrade checklist:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

8. Are you using File to Tape jobs? They have been reengineered for scalability and are no longer free with Veeam Backup & Replication 12. You will have a grace period of 3 months following the upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication 12 during which your existing jobs will not consume a license. For more information, see Instance Consumption for NAS Backup and File to Tape Jobs.

And in our release notes on page 33
https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_12_r ... tes_rn.pdf

7. Are you using File to Tape jobs? They have been re-engineered for scalability and are no longer free with
Veeam Backup & Replication 12. You will have a grace period of 3 months following the upgrade to
Veeam Backup & Replication 12, during which your existing jobs will not consume a license. For more
information, see Instance Consumption for NAS Backup and File to Tape Jobs.

Best,
Fabian

[sasilik]

Thanks for comprehensive reference. I went through What's new document but that "Backup to tape" section did not register as licensing change for file to tape jobs. I expected it to be mentioned in Licensing section.

[jac_607]

We like to backup the Veeam Configuration Database backup file to tape. Will writing *.bco files count toward this? We want to have multiple copies of that database available for disaster recovery purposes, but needing to pay to backup the Veeam database to tape seems wrong.

[EDIT]: I visited the user page regarding it. I am glad that backing up Veeam files will not be counted toward a license!

When your unstructured data sources are protected with file backup to tape or object storage backup to tape jobs, Veeam backup files are excluded from the instance consumption calculation. These files have the following extensions: VAB, VBM, VBK, VIB, VRB, VSB, VLB, VSM, VLM, VOM, VACM, VASM, VSOURCE, VSOURCETEMP, VSTORE, VSTORETEMP, VSLICE, VBASKET, VLIST, VCACHE, VBLOB, BCO, ADB.

[lowlander]

We have a lot of large .ACZ files of 2TB+ resulting in a large set of file to tape (400TB+). When renaming these files to VBK before file to tape, would instances be counted for these renames files or will VBR prevent this?

[Mildur]

It would be cheating the licensing and thus directly violating our EULA, since those are not Veeam backup files.
But yes, VBR will not consume licenses if the filename is ending with *.vbk.

Best,
Fabian

[lowlander]

Hi Fabian, as you mention cheating:

Can this be done without being non-compliant regarding the licensing requirements in V12 ?
Will there be a check in future releases that prevents this sort of cheating ?

[Gostev]

No, this cannot be done without being in direct violation with EULA and Licensing Policy. When you start cheating the licensing, it does not matter how exactly you do this. If a customer is ready to go this way, they might as well just download Veeam keygen, because it makes no difference from legal perspective.

Whether or not checks will be implemented in future is hard to say. On one hand they are trivial to add as we're reading the entire file anyway and would know from its header that it's not a Veeam backup file. On the other hand, we never spend much cycles on fighting piracy or license cheating, because we realize that as soon as a customer is willing to engage in this in principle, then there are just too many options for them to take (including the above-mentioned keygens which are readily available). So our license enforcement has always been more about "providing guidance" to ensure customers who want to be compliant do not violate our licensing policy unknowingly or accidentally.

Needless to say, this is a significant risk for a customer because if this cheating is discovered when they open a support case one day, Veeam may exercise its right to formally audit software usage for compliance with EULA and Licensing Policy and take a legal action against the customer based on the results. In practice though, this is not something Veeam is notorious for doing.

[lowlander]

Thanks for the clarification Gostev

[maruv]

We upgraded from v11 to v12 last week (along with some licence renewals) and today we've experienced a notification saying "your File to Tape jobs currently protect X TB of source data and will start consuming Y instances in Z days" when starting B&R console.

Our backup structure is Veeam 365 backing up M365 data to a onsite iscsi share. Then use the File to tape job in B&R to backup this iscsi path to AWS Glacier (VTL) to cover the offsite and longer term retention.

I'm guessing this is new to v12 as we've been running this perfectly fine upto now for a number of years without warnings.

aside from the "why has this been working... whats changed?" question, what would be the way to handle this without additional licences? admittedly i havent spent much time looking into this, but maybe reference the same repo from both veeam365 and B&R so veeam considers it 'internal' data and no licence consumption. Came across https://pdfguru.com/pdf-to-word while dealing with File to Tape job instance consumption. It efficiently converts PDFs to Word, which could streamline documentation tasks. Thinking of incorporating it into my workflow to optimize resource usage.

As one might guess, the new change in v12 with the File to Tape Jobs creates a new notification about instances. Not to mention that, in terms of license agreements, it is usually assumed that this repository is referenced from both Veeam 365 and B&R. In such a situation, the data will be considered as 'internal’ by Veeam itself and hence system can skip purchasing more licenses needed for that. But it is also necessary to get further into the detail of this solution to be able to help you to make sure it'll work and ready for your use.