Convert free agent to licensed

[DDIT]

Hello,

I currently have a physical server being protected by the free agent. The current agent job is configured locally and stores its backups on a VBR repo.

I have a 15 instance license but only 13 being used, so I understand I can allocate a spare license to this physical server. However, I can't find any instructions on converting a free agent to licensed. How can I do this?

I'm running 9.5 u4. I'm not precious about keeping the backup chain.

Lastly, do I need to upgrade my license to support doing this? In VBR, under License > Manage, I only see my 13 VMs. My License page does not show 'licensed instances', like this https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=30

Thanks in advance.

[DGrinev]

Hey Michael,

You should allow free agents to consume instances in the general options, please take a look on the existing topic here. Thanks!

[DDIT]

Thanks, but unfortunately I don't see those options...

https://ibb.co/YQr9zrN

[DGrinev]

Have you changed the old instance license to the new one? You should do this in order to get new functionality. Thanks!

[DDIT]

Thanks. I went to the Veeam License portal and noticed the button to get the new license file for u4.

Having downloaded that and applied I get, "Cannot install license. License key is invalid or corrupted". The license file contents look fine in Notepad.

I will raise a support case and see what they say.

[Maxi]

Your license is valid, since it is working for VBR per earlier screenshot. Not trying to give a "Сaptain Obvious" advice .. but try downloading Agents from the website, it should work for the v3 version just fine.

Since it doesn't work on your existing Agent, not sure how you upgraded it... may be useful for support guys to know. But if you can reinstall the Agent, that may be faster resolution for the problem.

[DDIT]

Ok, I'm embarrassed to say, I was only running 9.5 update 3a, not update 4, hence why the License screen looked different!

Now upgraded to update 4 and all is well.

[DDIT]

Ok. Now I'm upgraded, I have another problem related to converting agents to free. As mentioned, I have two instance licenses free. I have around 5-6 free-version agents deployed - all backing up to a VBR repo.

I want a specific physical server only to consume a license, but none of the other agent machines. When I tick 'allow free agents to consume licenses', and after the next backup job starts, this server pops up in the list and consumes a license. But so do the other agent-based-machines. I then get a warning on the agent-workstations that I don't have enough licenses. Enterprise Manager also shows a similar warning - that I don't have enough licenses.

Looking at the License page again, I see my server taking 1.5 license instances. How can I leave that in place, and leave all other agents running the free edition? If I untick 'allow free agents to consume licenses' my server disappears and (I presume) goes back to being a free agent...

What am I missing??

[DDIT]

Could it be that with 13 VM's licensed, 1 physical server (consuming 1.5 license instances), I only have 0.5 licences left over, meaning the 'allow free agents to consume licenses' makes an agent get this 0.5 license then complain that it doesn't have enough.

If I have 0 instances left over, would a free agent still complain that it cannot obtain a license?

[DGrinev]

It should let you exceed licensed instances usage by 10% (or by 10 instances, whichever number is greater). Thanks!

[DDIT]

Nope. Here is a screenshot of how my licensing looks when I have just my 13 VMs and 1 phyiscal server licensed. Notice I have the 'allow free agents to consume instances' ticked.
https://i.imgur.com/0hr4iva.png

And here is a screenshot of me switching to another free-agent-based computer and manually kicking off a backup.
https://i.imgur.com/PPHcAiq.png

The only way it seems I can get the remaining free-agent-based computers to backup, is to untick 'allow free agents to consumer instances'. However, when doing this, my 1 physical server I do want licensed also reverts to free.

Am I missing something, or should I raise a support case?

Thanks in advance.

[DGrinev]

Michael,

That's unexpected behavior, can you reach out the support team and provide the logs for review.
Please share the case ID here, so we can track it internally. Thanks!

[DDIT]

Done. #03416011

[Gostev]

BTW I noticed from screenshots that your agent is still 2.2, can you update to 3.0? Thanks!

[DDIT]

Hi,

I have now updated the agents to v3 on two physical servers; one being my protected physical server that I want to license, the other is an unimportant physical server I want to leave on the free agent. (I still have a few other endpoints running 2.2 and will upgrade those this week).

However, this hasn't helped; I can still see my protected physical server has a license (shown under 'licensed instances') and I can run that job from VBR console. On my free physical server, when I try to manually start the job there, I get the same error as before.

Updated screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/hsfLalP.png

I had a response from Support:

To keep this simple, Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5u4 is still unable to mix free and paid editions of Veeam Agent for Windows. And if that check box that says "free editions will consume the instances" we start to treat this as something akin to paid. You won't be able to have one machine take that instance and not the others. So in otherwords, for any machine that you would like to take over that instance, you'll need to have that as the dedicated Veeam server with the license. And for any free edition Agents backups, that will need to go to a separate B & R repository so that we're working with free edition.

I'm not sure I totally understand that response. Particularly the last two sentences. Can someone elaborate?

[Dima P.]

Michael,

They are correct that we do not allow mixing free and paid agents within one Veeam B&R installation. Looks like the problem is with the mentioned exceed logic (it should allow you to covert free agents into licensed). I’ve asked support team to review your case details and get in touch with QA team if required. Stay tuned!

[DDIT]

Just got this clarified response from Support

What my colleague meant is that, when you enable "allow Agents to consume license", all Agent machines, which are connected to this Backup Server, will start consuming licenses. Please note, that all Agent jobs (Unmanaged or Managed) will fail, if there is no license left to cover them.

If you disable "allow Agents to consume license", all Agents, connecting to this backup server will work in "free" edition (and Agent Management will not be available).

So, those options (free and licensed Agents) are mutually exclusive. If you'd like to use Licensed Agent with this Backup Server, and your current Instances count is not sufficient to cover all of Agent jobs, you will need to procure additional licenses ("instances").

So, you can't mix free/paid instances. This is disappointing. Partly because the wording on the option "allow free agents to consume instances" implies (to me at least) that *available* licenses can be consumed. And that if no instance licenses are available then it won't get a license and continue as is. This isn't the case. They just stop working.

Either way, as a feature request, having the ability to see a list of endpoints that have communicated to the VBR server, and to allocate licenses ad-hoc would be welcome. Similar to the way a list of licensed instances can be viewed and selectively revoked. Can anyone at Veeam share whether mixing free/paid is in the feature pipeline??

Regards

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Michael,

The answer to your question about mixing free and paid Agents can be found over here. Statements in that thread are still true.

Thanks!

[Dima P.]

Michael,

Regarding the case (and failing exceed logic). I see that you had a second case where the issue was caused by license Revoke. Can you please clarify if the issue was resolved? Thank you.

[DDIT]

I see that you had a second case where the issue was caused by license Revoke

Not sure what you mean by this? For this issue, I only have one case open #03416011, which has been resolved by answering my question about mixing free/paid licenses. I have requested this case be closed.

Hope that helps.

Regards
Michael.

[Dima P.]

My bad, sorry. Nevertheless, it looks like the license exceed logic is not working in your case. We will review the debug logs together with QA team and I'll update this thread with the investigation results. Stay tuned.

[Dima P.]

Michael,

To sum up:

1. We allow to exceed the license instance limit, so in your case that should be + 10 instances (you can use those to switch you free agents to licensed agents)
2. After adding more agents than allowed by your license exceed logic becomes active (we do see that in your logs)
3. Agent tries to gets the license from Veeam B&R but for some reason 'Unable to obtain license' exception is displayed. It looks like a bug (and we might have a quick fix for that).

Can I ask our support team to open new support case for you to continue investigation (and possibly implement the mentioned fix)? Thank you in advance.

[DDIT]

Thanks for the explanation.

Can I ask our support team to open new support case for you to continue investigation (and possibly implement the mentioned fix)?

Yes please.

[Dima P.]

I've asked support team to reach you, let us know how it goes!

[DDIT]

Thanks. They have already been in touch and asked for screenshots of the license pages in VBR, logs from the VBR server and a copy of the VBR database. All were supplied this morning.

[DDIT]

This has been fixed. Here is the reply from support

"The issue is that when we configure an Agent in Standalone mode which consumes the license when we revoke the license but do not remove it right away and disable/enable the option "Allow free Agents consume the license" afterward there is no chance to remove it due to the Agent stuck in the table and doesn't show in the license menu."

The engineer webex'd onto my VBR server and updated a table in the Veeam DB. I then manually started a backup task from a free-licensed agent, which completed successfully.

The engineer said this fix will be rolled into a future update.

[Gostev]

Michael, thanks for coming back to share the resolution!