Home Lab licensing for consultants

[dellock6]

And to add my 2 cents, if you only need free licenses for testing purposes, Veeam has made in the past many offers for 2-sockets NFR licenses to VMware VCP, vExperts and other professionals. 2 sockets for tests are more than enough...

Luca.

[hawkbox]

If I'm reading part of the argument made initially here correctly, it's incredibly to do "development" work in a production environment straight off. If a VAR can't afford a dev environment for a product they shouldn't be selling the product. This frankly seems exactly like expecting kickbacks to me and it's incredibly distasteful.

[sparky50]

Some of us don't "live" in the simple utopian environments that are mentioned here. We are a corporate reseller, about 20 staff, four Production ESXi hosts, and about 30 Production VM's. This doesn't even begin to touch the testing and dev environments which are much larger. For those 20 people, we probably have $60-80K in networking gear in the Production environment as well. Why, because we don't feel you can really test anything properly, unless it is in our Production environment. We learn about the strengths and weaknesses, we go through the pain of patching and upgrades. We haven't found any perfect products yet, still looking.

We also use our Production environment for customer demo's, and nothing impresses like an environment that is running a broad spectrum of servers, just like the customers run. I'm happy that some people have enough time to thoroughly, and I mean THOROUGHLY test products they will resell. I don't, working 7 days a week, and 10-12 hours most day, just doesn't allow me that. I'm lucky if I can give a product more than a couple hours of testing, and I sure as heck don't have the time to try doing patching, and version upgrades. By incorporating a product into my Production environment, I am forced to live with the gain, and the pain, that customers experience.

And with four Production hosts, no $800 license is going to cut it, it would be much more. We have worked with Veeam for a long time, and we love the product. One of my techs was even asked, and did speak at a Veeam user conference. We didn't charge for that tech's time, we did it freely (and happily). However, the sale of backup/replication software is an infinitely small portion of our business, and our profit. Is this so much to ask from a vendor, to allow a software key be used internally? I think Veeam does/would get good value for allowing their resellers to use the product internally.

We used to promote another product, from a major vendor, who does provide free internal use licenses to us. If you crack down on resellers over license keys, then the reality is that many will promote another product. This is a fiscal reality in a marketplace where profit margins are so thin.

I know you don't all agree with me, and that's fine. I'm glad you can afford to purchase every product you resell, and test it thoroughly. I couldn't even begin to do such a thing.

[ftravinsky]

Sorry for bringing this thread back to life.. but..

What's current partner level requirement for obtaining an internal use license in EMEA region?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Fedor,

It's better to contact Veeam sales reps directly or try to find an answer on the ProParnter Portal... the people behind these forums are with Veeam R&D, and we don't know much about sales and licensing.

Keep in mind that if you want something for the home lab and the Community Edition is insufficient, then you can also get a partner NFR license for free - just contact your Veeam rep. This is different from the "internal use" license though.

Thanks!

P.S. Thanks for using search before posting!