Error: Unable to process workload: license has been exceeded

[ejenner]

Hi guys,

I know this message looks to have an obvious cause but I'm struggling to think of a way I could clear down licenses from elsewhere to make sure this file share backup succeeds.

16/08/2020 21:40:33 :: Processing XXXXXX Error: Unable to process workload: license has been exceeded

I'm quite close to my license limit. It says I can exceed the limit by a further 3 licenses (it seems you get 10 instance licenses grace?)

I'm having immense difficulty getting through to anybody at Veeam regards our current licensing situation. I am attempting to understand whether or not we'd be better off using the new universal license which came with Version 10. But having been emailing for weeks (maybe months) I've not had any response other than an out-of-office and a promise from the same colleague that someone would deail with the inquiry.

We don't really have to get more from the software than what we pay for. But we purchase licenses once a year and we're mid-way through that period so if I can't resolve this I'm going to be stuck with failing backups for the next 6+ months.

[Gostev]

Hey there,

Indeed, the reason for this message is that the remaining 3 licenses is not enough to cover the size of a file share you're trying to backup. Moreover, even without this share, you are already exceeding the license usage (you're correct, we do allow to exceed the licensed amount by 10 instances or 10%, whichever is greater). So, it does sound like you need more universal licenses.

I see you live in the U.K. so I will ask the corresponding sales team to actually reach out to you. Let us know if you don't hear back within the next 24 hours.

Thanks!

[ejenner]

Hi Gostev, thanks for that.

I think during preparation of my information prior to speaking to your colleague it has become clear what the issue is.



I've started using the new file share backup facility and converted some of our Veeam Agent for Windows jobs to file share jobs.

You can see from the screenshot that Veeam have come up with this idea of 250GB being the equivalent of one instance license which must be a joke for an enterprise-grade product?

In a small business they might use one or two terabytes for their business data and that would take between 4 and 8 licenses, which isn't that many.

However, the jobs which I've been converting to the new File Share backup... if I had managed to change all of the jobs to File Share type... it would use 284 licenses at our current data size and if we filled up our SAN we'd require 432 licenses! For the same money we could employ someone full time to print out our data and put it in a filing cabinet.

To resolve this issue, unless Veeam come up with something very fast I'm going to have to steer back away from use of the File Share backup type and revert to use of Windows Agent which only required 4 licenses for the same data.

If the new File Share backup feature was added with the intention of people using it then there's going to be very little take-up with the license consumption being so high... assuming I've not misunderstood, which of course if I have then I sincerely apologise.

[Gostev]

You can see from the screenshot that Veeam have come up with this idea of 250GB being the equivalent of one instance license which must be a joke for an enterprise-grade product?

Not a joke at all, as this is actually at least a few times cheaper than all other enterprise-grade products.

You're absolutely correct though in that the VUL-based NAS licensing was targeted at small businesses who just needs to protect a handful of their business data. While with your unstructured data size, you might be better of acquiring a non-portable NAS Capacity package, which comes with a big volume discount. This is something you will want to discuss with your Veeam sales rep.

If the new File Share backup feature was added with the intention of people using it then there's going to be very little take-up with the license consumption being so high...

We need real-world sales data to come to the right number. As the link above demonstrates, we're in a pretty good place for a start comparing to the current market. There's a lot of interest in this functionality, and we're actively monitoring the discount levels when our customers buy VUL for NAS protection. Eventually, we will just bake the typical discount level right into the product by changing those 250GB per VUL to some higher number. It is much better than going the other way around (reducing the number that was originally set too high), as this will make all the existing customers unhappy.

[ejenner]

It is much better than going the other way around (reducing the number that was originally set too high), as this will make all the existing customers unhappy.

But I am an existing customer and I am unhappy? Which existing customers were you thinking of? I think that's a misunderstanding of priorities, putting the company first and customers second.

I used to be heavily involved with the Asigra product (the UK distributor) and their only licensing model was the capacity of the repository (i.e. buy a 100GB license to store 100GB of de-dupe compressed data). That wasn't a bad model and put them at a significant advantage against other software providers at the time.

What seems to be going wrong here is you have a mixture of different licensing models which you've got to be an expert to understand. Your colleague on the phone didn't mention the option of non-portable NAS Capacity package. I don't think they were aware the option actually existed or it would've been mentioned?

In the immediate future I'm going to have to spend a few days reverting these File Share jobs to Windows Agent Jobs to get our system fully functional again. I'm a touch fearful this is going to result in missing backups unless I can work out a way of keeping what was written to disk with the File Share backup so I can get the data back if a restore is required.

At the end of the day we (the customers) know we have to pay to use the product, but Veeam should be a bit more responsible when it comes to making changes like this, with an eye to what could go wrong in circumstances such as ours. We've not really attempted to do anything other than use the product but the way the software has responded is totally unexpected.

I think from our point of view our ideal licensing model wouldn't be granular forever like it is right now but rather once past a certain point we could obtain unrestricted use of the product for a fixed price. You'll probably say that option already exists (if it does, we don't know about it or can't afford it)

[Gostev]

But I am an existing customer and I am unhappy? Which existing customers were you thinking of?

In the context of my post, you're still a prospect (for the NAS backup functionality). Perhaps you misunderstood my point - I was talking about two possible approaches of arriving at the "right" number of GBs per VUL.

First approach (the one we chose) is by increasing this value after monitoring typical discount level based on the initial low value. In this case, only a few prospects will be left unhappy - only those who could not get to the price they had in mind even with a discount. And these prospects we likely won't be able to make happy regardless.

Second approach may require possibly reducing this value down the road due to having the initial one set too high, and facing the impact on our revenue and profitability (due to customers changing their backups just like you're now going from using a File Share backup to using an Agent backup, only in the opposite direction). If we were forced to make such a change, then all the existing customers using File Share backup would be totally mad - because with less GB included per VUL, they wouldn't be able to continue protecting the same file shares they were able to protect before.

As far as your sales person interactions - unfortunately, I'm with R&D and so I can't comment on what our sales do. We have all those options available, including even the "unrestricted use" one (it's called ELA). But every advanced licensing option has certain minimal thresholds, which are fairly large - so perhaps you're simply not eligible for any of them, I don't know.

[ejenner]

The issue here is the disparity in cost for protecting the same data two different ways within the same product. One way costs at least 4 times more than the other. That higher cost must come down and fall in line with the regular price we normally pay for using Veeam to protect our data. If it were to go the other way and the lower costs were quadrupled to match the higher cost of this new feature we would have to go and look for a new backup product.

Perhaps a model which could work for you would be to allocate a license for every 250GB as you are now, but to cap it at 2TB so the maximum any File Share backup will use is 8 licenses even if the data size is greater.

As I said before in the previous post, the licensing has become so mixed and complex that even your sales people don't know what all the options are.

[Gostev]

The issue here is the disparity in cost for protecting the same data two different ways within the same product. One way costs at least 4 times more than the other.

But it's not, and in fact in the grand scheme of things it is the opposite. Today, 1 VUL currently protects 125GB of useful data when it resides in a VM, and 250GB of useful data when it resides on NAS. So in the grand scheme of things, NAS backup is not 4 times more expensive - but rather 2 times cheaper than image-level backup.

Of course, when you compare a single 10TB VM vs. 10TB NAS, then it's a different story. However, looking at extreme cases is not how you come up with the good decision for anything at all.

For example, just like you currently see yourself migrating from file backup jobs to image-level backup jobs as the way to optimize costs with the current VUL weighting, we saw the potential of other customers migrating in another direction (from image-level backup jobs to file backup jobs) if the price was set too low on the latter. Which would instantly hit our revenue and profitability, and nothing good ever happens with unprofitable companies. You would soon see cost cutting measures applied here and there - I don't think any of our customers would have enjoyed this. And importantly, we would have achieved exactly the opposite of what we hoped for with this investment, when we added a new capability to be able to protect additional data sources and increase our revenue.

As I have already demonstrated above, comparing to the enterprise backup current market, our NAS backup pricing derived from 250GB per 1 VUL is quite low. This is somehow the fact everyone tries to ignore despite it is the direct apples to apples comparison. Is it the perfect ratio? No, but what I keep saying is it's a very good start. Arriving to the right "VUL to GB" ratio requires careful balancing through observing real-world buying and usage patterns, and typical discounts given to customers to arrive to the price which in their mind is acceptable for their production data stored on NAS. And this is exactly the research we're going through right now.

As I said before in the previous post, the licensing has become so mixed and complex that even your sales people don't know what all the options are.

Well, industry analysts disagree with you here. The current mainstream licensing is very simple: you buy universal licenses, and you protect any workloads with them, with every workload consuming 1 universal license. I don't know if it gets any simpler than that, in fact Gartner really praised us about this licensing approach in their last research on all enterprise backup vendors. And they really research the market deeply.

[vmtech123]

As someone with a LOT of 10+ TB VM's, I was hoping to go to NAS backup, and file to tape, but will be using Image backup and Image to tape. I may end up getting a few VUL's for file archiving if testing works well, but I was hoping Enterprise would cover the ability to backup the vm's on these hosts both ways.

[ejenner]

As I said before in the previous post, the licensing has become so mixed and complex that even your sales people don't know what all the options are.

Well, industry analysts disagree with you here. The current mainstream licensing is very simple: you buy universal licenses, and you protect any workloads with them, with every workload consuming 1 universal license. I don't know if it gets any simpler than that, in fact Gartner really praised us about this licensing approach in their last research on all enterprise backup vendors. And they really research the market deeply.

Sorry, but I didn't mention industry analysts and it wasn't an opinion. It's a fact that when dealing with Veeam sales people they didn't know about the licensing scheme you mentioned. That's a fact, you can't really disagree. They listed all the options available and didn't include the non-portable NAS Capacity package you mentioned. I have since had further contact from your sales team to explore that option but it's out of our league entirely so we'll be sticking with what we've got for the moment.

This has been a useful thread overall as I understand what's happening now. I don't have to win the argument on whether or not you have this license designed correctly because the cold hard facts are that we cannot afford to use it and I know there will be plenty of other customers in the same boat. So from my point of view all I have to do is wait for Veeam to realise this. I didn't have the feature available to me pre-V10 so I'll just continue as if it never existed.

[Gostev]

Right, so just as I suspected: they did not even offer you the advanced NAS licensing option - not because they did not know about it, but simply because it did not make sense for the total capacity you have in the first place.

By the way, I also never considered this thread as an argument. I just wanted to clearly demonstrate the logic behind our approach of arriving to the "correct" value of protected NAS capacity per VUL. And I kept answering to your points simply because I didn't want you to walk a way with an impression that we're doing some random and totally unreasonable stuff with the NAS backup pricing. So, I'm glad to hear you found this exchange useful.

[vmtech123]

I'll just add to this thread as it is relevant and a tad confused.

If I have Veeam Enterprise on my entire VMware cluster, those file servers are protected. If I add them as "file servers" to veeam, and do a file to tape job, when will it stop allowing me to backup or warn me about licenses? Or is this different than added a "Nas Device"

[Gostev]

File to Tape jobs is free functionality, so you don't have to worry about licensing at all.

[vmtech123]

Well this makes getting of TSM Even MORE reasonable.

[Gostev]

Depends on the number of files we're talking about. This functionality was initially built to copy our backups to tape (so fewer of larger files). Then, we extended it to general purpose files too, but the architecture remained the same and it does not really scale beyond a few millions of files. Which was not a problem because the target for this feature was our free edition, which is used by small customers.

We do have plans to re-design the architecture down the road though to improve scalability by a few orders of magnitude, because there's a strong demand to copy our NAS backups to tape.