community Edition: What is an "instance"?

[AaronKCollege]

The Veeam Backup and Recovery Community Edition says it's "Free for up to 10 instances". What constitutes an "instance"? If I want to use B&R community edition to manage Agent for Windows and Agent for Linux on various systems, does that mean it will only manage ten agents? Or does that mean I can only have 10 B&R servers or what?

[Dima P.]

Hello Aaroun,

Every object protected by Veeam B&R console has it's own 'licensing weight' which will be consumed from the instance count set in the license. For Community edition this count is set to 10 instances. To learn more about conversion ratios please check this table (Community edition has the same ratio as Standard edition).

If I want to use B&R community edition to manage Agent for Windows and Agent for Linux on various systems, does that mean it will only manage ten agents

Ten agents licensed as workstations (as workstation consumes 1 instance). Cheers!

[AaronKCollege]

Ah, so the community edition can only be used with ten systems. Ok. Maybe I'll put the high profile ones on B&R and leave the rest with just the Agent. That's fine.

And actually, it's much less than that as it apparently applies a x3 multiplier so adding just one windows server uses 3 "instances"

[Dima P.]

Aaron,

That's correct physical servers consume 3 instances in the Standard or Community edition. Server license is assigned by default to all the machines with server OS type, however, you can change licensing the mode to workstation by creating the job with the workstation type (managed by agent > workstation) and that would license your server as workstation.

[Tecbil]

I've checked the table but what I don't understand is:
When talking about "Workstation" or "Server" instances are we talking about physical computers with Veeam Agent installed and then connected to Veeam B&R server for centralized management?

[Dima P.]

Yes, that's correct (could be centrally managed agents or standalone agent deployments with license distributed by Veeam B&R).

[GordM]

For clarity, if we have:

- 2 physical VMWare hosts (under VM Essentials)
- 20 VMs
- A separate physical Server running Veeam B&R to back up 15 VMs runnning on the 2 physical VMHosts hosts

How many Instances would Veeam count that as?

Thanks,
Gord

[Gostev]

20 + 15 = 35

[GordM]

OK, I was confused with (https://www.veeam.com/blog/backup-repli ... ption.html) that said unlimited VMs, but I just googled to see the difference between what you said and the qualified unlimited VMs statements on that URL:

"Free forever – unlimited VMs
So, once you exceed 10 instances, what can you do to protect the remaining VMs? While you gain Standard edition functionality with Community Edition for up to 10 VMs, you will still be able to utilize VeeamZIP for those extra VMs that don’t quite make the 10 instances ceiling. Yes, just like before, we still allow you to protect an unlimited number of VMs with VeeamZIP for free. You’re probably wondering how does this work? Once 10 instances have been consumed, you will no longer be able to utilize the extended functionality included in Standard edition and when you try to run additional backup jobs, they will fail stating that the license has been exceeded. So, be mindful and selective of the VMs you are protecting with fully featured backup jobs — make sure you use the first 10 instances for your most important VMs, which actually do require strict RPO.

And for the rest of less important VMs, you can still use VeeamZIP! If you are not familiar with VeeamZIP, it’s a simple way to take an ad-hoc backup of a VM."

Thanks,
Gord

[Dima P.]

Hello Gord,

we still allow you to protect an unlimited number of VMs with VeeamZIP for frees

Blog post refers to VeeamZIP functionality, which you can use for any VMs in your production without any instance counters being consumed.

If you want to protect VM or Physical workload on a daily basis (via backup job activity) - instance counter will be consumed. Makes sense?

[dpatterson]

With the introduction of Veeam Universal Licensing, will Community Edition be able to backup more than 3 physical agents? Some of the schools we recommend Veeam for have less than 10 servers, but more than 3 of them are still physical since they are late to get on the virtualization bandwagon.

Will a change in the instance consumption multiplier not take effect until v10 of Community Edition is released?

[Gostev]

This is still to be decided for v10. Switching CE to Veeam Universal Licensing means giving away protection for 10 physical servers, which is... a whole lot of money to leave on the table especially considering that most Veeam competitors currently charge anywhere between USD 500 to USD 1500 per physical server! So, a whole bunch of people at Veeam will need to bite a big bullet for this to happen