Following case ref 02729839 I've been advised by Evgeniy to post this as a feature request, but it's also a warning to others.
We've just lost three months of backups, including some student exam work I need to restore, due to a perfectly plausible set of circumstances that others may find themselves in.
Scenario:
- Originally using free VAW (Windows Agents) since they came out, destined to our B&R repository
- Both agents affected were Server OS's
- Email notifications were not configured on the VAW job itself, because B&R was sending notifications for all jobs on B&R
- Purchased 5 VAW Workstation licenses and installed them on B&R - don't need App Aware or granular backup control so workstation licenses are valid, even for server OS's
- Once VAW licenses are installed on the B&R server, any existing Free agents will be auto assigned licenses IF they match (Server OS = Server agent license, Workstation OS = Workstation agent license).
- However IF you bought Workstation licenses for agents running a Server OS, those jobs will FAIL as they don't get issued licenses automatically
- B&R notifications for the job will therefore STOP, as the agent job can't "contact" the B&R repository without a license, so it doesn't send job status report
- Remember, VAW job notifications were not configured as previously B&R notifications were in effect so I didn't need duplicate notifications
- Therefore you will NOT BE NOTIFIED that your jobs are failing due to no license assigned, and thus you will lose backups if you're not checking them.
This is a feature request that when installing agent licenses onto B&R, a warning pops up if you have existing Agent jobs configured, to warn you that mismatched licenses won't be auto assigned and jobs will start to fail without warning. Ideally the "manage licenses" dialog should pop up and force you to assign licenses (inc "free" licenses) to all existing jobs so that this can't happen.
Peter