Unhandled exception was thrown during licensing process

[Ilya V]

There was a problem upgrading components from version 11 to version 12.
The socket license is perpetual.
The subscription for instances ended and 10 free instances were used.
After the upgrade, the free instances disappeared and an error appears when backing up agents:
Error: Unhandled exception was thrown during licensing process

If you delete the license, it switches completely to the free version and instances appear. But if you install the license again only for sockets, the result is the same, licenses for instances disappear again.

Before(11.0.1.1261ver):

After(12.1.0.2131ver):

[d.artzen]

I am not a Veeam employee, so I could be wrong, but I see in your screenshot that your Support is expired since 12.2023. AFAIK you can't upgrade VBR to a higher major version with expired support. The perpetual socket licenses is not enough alone for an upgrade, it just doesn't expire in the original version. So this could explain it.

[Mildur]

Hi Ilya,

Each socket license comes with 1 gifted instance per socket (with a maximum of 6 instances per backup server).
These gifted free instance licenses are only usable with an active maintenance contract. When your maintenance contract expires, the free instances are disabled.

Daniel is also correct — without an active maintenance contract, you are not able to upgrade our product.
I don't understand how an upgrade worked for you. But it shouldn't be possible.

I see three options:
- Renew the maintenance contract (contact our sales team to ask if its still possible)
- Buy new VUL licenses to cover your virtual and physical workloads
- Use the community edition (limited to 10 instances)

Thank you,
Fabian Kessler

[Ilya V]

Thanks for your answers.
Unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to renew the contract.

12.1.0.2131ver(2023.12.06) was released before the contract expired (2023.12.22)
We could have legally updated in December 2023, but we were a bit late
When I tried updating to the latest release (12.2.0.334) - there really was an expired contract error and the installation stopped.