Licensing Costs

[mkramer]

We have a total of 8 sockets in our server farm and have been backing up 100 VMs with Veeam for a few years. That would equate to 12.5 VMs per socket. Thus the cost for one Veeam license would be spread across the 12.5 VMs.

We recently created a new VMware cluster and added 4 more sockets to our datacenter that is specifically dedicated to our VOIP phone system. The entire cluster only runs 7 VMs. The physical blades are much lower in CPU speed and RAM compared to our server cluster, but they are dedicated to just one system.

My question is how can Veeam justify charging the same license cost for both use cases? There only seems to be a one size fits all licensing model that doesn’t account for how many VMs are actually being utilized by the socket tied to the Veeam license.

Am I missing something?

[chrisdearden]

Like the underlying hypervisor , we are licenced by host CPU socket. Would you want to have to tell the business that they can't deploy another VM on the cluster that has plenty of resources , because you have run out of licences for your backup product?

For Service Providers , we do have a per VM model , but again that follows the model used for Service Provider licencing by Microsoft and VMware.

[Gostev]

My question is how can Veeam justify charging the same license cost for both use cases? There only seems to be a one size fits all licensing model that doesn’t account for how many VMs are actually being utilized by the socket tied to the Veeam license.

Please note that everything you said equally applies to VMware licensing. I don't suppose you paid less than normal for your VMware licenses because your second cluster is underutilized? And if so, it is not clear where you are coming from with your question. Why should Veeam be any different, adding new dimensions to a very simple, per-socket licensing for any and all virtualization software.