unneeded licenses and excluded workloads

[pirx]

# 07706843

We renewed our contract a while ago and reduced the number of VUL licenses as workloads we backup with Veeam are shrinking, we checked VBR license information before. We then checked VBR license information and after reducing licenses to 1800 and we still have 50+ unused. BUT in Veeam One we are above the licensed VULs by 30-40. In VBR we only backup a subset of all VMs. In VO we do not have the ability to excluded workloads as we wish. We do not need monitoring for any cloud workload, but we can't exclude this. Basically, we want to only monitor our on-prem workloads and don't case about cloud.

Now we have to think about the next steps, but it was not expected that we have to license based on workloads that we do not care about.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi,

When backup data comes from Veeam B&R, it is impossible to exclude it (it is either all or nothing). Exclusions are only possible for virtual infrastructure objects to which Veeam ONE has direct access.

Also, VDP Advanced keys are always cut with the same number of instances for Veeam B&R and Veeam ONE.

Thanks for the feedback anyway!

[gcg]

We had a customer in a similar situation and they had license bloat in Veeam ONE due to the Virtual Infrastructure part, not the VBR part. We worked with them to identify the sub-set of their virtual machines that they didn't want/need to monitor in Veeam ONE (e.g., x copies of their web front-end, their AD servers that they're monitoring with another system, etc.). Once we got that, we were able to add Exclusion filters to Veeam ONE on the Virtual Infrastructure side and that brought the numbers way down and within the licensing limit. We could have turned off the Virtual Infrastructure monitoring completely in Veeam ONE, but they did like to get some of the reports on snapshots and other things for their critical servers that their existing monitoring tool didn't catch, so it was useful. But, if you don't intend to use Veeam ONE to monitor/report on anything but your Backup Infrastructure, you can just add an Exclude All rule on your Virtual Infrastructure bits and then it will just monitor Veeam ONE.

[pirx]

We want to have the on-prem metrics for reporting in Veeam One. We don't need anything about cloud instances in Veeam One. But we can't exclude them. We'd need to exclude the 178 instances that are backed up by Veeam but it's not possible to exclude workloads that are backed up.

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Yes, Public Cloud can not be excluded today, similar to anything else coming from Backup & Replication that is not Virtual Infrastructure (vSphere/Hyper-V). I can see a few workarounds:

• Ask your Veeam representative for a quote that includes all required workloads
• Have two different VBRs, one for the VBClouds, and another for the rest. And add to VONE just the one you need
• Perhaps there are certain VMs from those 1500 from VMware that you do not really need to protect. There is a good Business View rule that allows to monitor just VMs that have a backup, and omits everything else, for simplicity.

I cannot think of anything else as this functionality it is not part of Veeam Data Platform, and I am not quite sure we will be able to provide it in the future. You backup X workloads, but you monitor another Y that are different.

Please let us know if the second or third workaround fits. Thank you!

[pirx]

For On-prem we have businesses objects to create reports. Only VMs with a certain cmdb field are included in reports. That doe not exist for cloud instances. So the public cloud report is useless for us as we only backup a subset what exist there. We had to fall back to scripts to archive the same result we have for on-prem.

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
In v12.3 we added filtering for this specific report so you can use some masks on instances name to include/exclude them:


In v13, we have filtering for every column, so it will be easier to filter anything from any report.

But this doesn't match the initial request. I can see Cloud VMs, we are reporting the same VONE and VBR. It is in VMs where Veeam ONE is including more VMs. Are all of those VMware/Hyper-V? Because those can be excluded.

Thank you!