Licensing Issues with U4

[Gostev]

Right, you will always have access to those "standalone" (so to speak) license keys with the expiration date set according to the length of subscription you bought. It's only merged keys that will have their expiration date set according to the contract that expires first.

When you get a chance, please confirm that you can see those "standalone" keys on the Customer Portal, and let us know in case of any issues downloading them. Thanks!

[Gostev]

If this is not supported, why does the licensing webpage allow you to do the merge then? Why isn't the merge link hidden or some message being displayed when you click on it, that you can't do the merge since you aren't the license admin?

The correct error message is displayed now reflecting lack of privileges as a possible issue, it just was not there on day 1... consider it a bug with exceptions handling.

[chris-au]

Hi Peter,

Yes, all license keys have to be merged into one file and the expiration date will set to the most recent (earliest) one from either of the contracts. To resolve this you can contact your sales rep to renew the contract with the earliest date of expiration (to match the date from another contract) or you can keep using this license key, and once it expires just install your previous license key that had a longer support expiration period.

Hope this helps!

Once one license expires (thus causing the merged license key to expire), when that expired license is renewed can it then be re-merged with the other license/s that have not yet expired to provide a single key and can be repeated as needed?

It seems that these changes to licensing have an ulterior motive because these changes definitely have not simplified the process.

[Gostev]

Yes, of course your Instance license can be re-merged with any non-expired Socket license.

To simplify things going forward, you could just co-term your support contracts - in which case, they will all be expiring at the same time, for example every 3 years?

Or, you can go one step further and convert your Sockets to Instances - in this case, you will have a single license counter with ultimate portability between all Veeam products you're using. And depending on your licensed sockets quantity and VMs density per socket, it may actually appear that you don't need to keep buying those extra licenses to cover agents, as you do it today.

[Helferlein]

So when I merge now all my licenses they expire in june 2020 instead of december 2021.

In June 2020 there actually is expiring only a 10 instance Agent license. So I then buy a renewal of the 10 instance agent license and re-merge with the new licenses and so the merged expiry date will expand again to let's say June 2021.

Is this correct as I see this?

It's kinda wierd. It would be much easier to just add all single licenses to Veeam and then it could show what license is when expiring and so we would know to renew just that one...

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you correctly see this, and as Anton said you might want to consider co-terming your support contracts so that they expire at the same time and you need to renew it only once.

It might sound easier, however, the more products/features are integrated into the product, the more license keys you will need to manage, this all is definitely harder than just having a single license key that unlocks all the products/features and needs to be renewed every other X years.

[cb1ocker]

Those of you who were able to get additional license administrators assigned through support, how did you get them to do it? We just tried today and were told it wasn't possible and we would have to create a shared account if we wanted more than one person with the license administrator role. When we shared the info from gostev in this thread we were told it was not correct.

[Gostev]

My info was directly from the VP behind the portal, so I will just ask him to comment here.

[Maxi]

If request comes from a License administrator, there should be no problem for support adding additional people to this role.
I can look into specific request, if you provide me with the case number.

[cb1ocker]

*Edit with correct case number:

Case # 03387542

Thank you!

[masonit]

Hi

Sry if this question has already been answered.

We have EM (9.5 u3) with 4 VBR (9.5 u3) servers connected. I will start with upgrading EM to u4 and after that upgrade all vbr server to u4 in a couple of weeks. During this period some vbr servers will be u3 and some u4. When should I upload new merged u4 license file in EM? Do I have to wait until all connected vbr servers are upgraded or will u3 servers also accept new u4 license file?

\Masonit

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Magnus,

Veeam B&R servers running Update 3 will not be able to accept a new license key (instance-based). Please keep in mind that after upgrading to U4, all your servers will switch to a 90 days grace period (if the new license key hasn't been provided). This grace period might be enough for you to roll out the U4 to all managed servers. You can upload the new merged license key to the EM as soon as your entire infrastructure is upgraded to U4.

Hope this helps!

[masonit]

Ok, sounds good. Thanks!

[PariPari]

2. We have a number of licensing cases which may appear to be cause by invalid license issued by the portal, but in reality is likely some bug in the product with the in-place upgrade, because the license is confirmed to be valid. This issue one is now with T3 for investigation, and seems like this is the only one to be concerned about at the moment. We will update once we know more, but if you have this issue - please remember that opening additional support cases always help (more data to work with).

Any News on this? We created a trial key with 1000 instances today from a customer account. We cannot install the license in a brand new U4 Installation as it says "invalid license" on both console and Enterprise Manager.

[veremin]

May I ask you what your support ticket number for this issue? Thanks!

[cb1ocker]

Thank you Maxi for looking into my ticket about additional license administrators. They were able to add me as a secondary license admin, but they did note that the ability for secondary license admins to actually use the Merge function is not available yet, but will be coming soon.

[Gostev]

Any News on this? We created a trial key with 1000 instances today from a customer account. We cannot install the license in a brand new U4 Installation as it says "invalid license" on both console and Enterprise Manager.

Please open a support case, as AFAIK none of those issues I mentioned were confirmed, with all ended up being customer mistakes. In general, there are no known issues around "invalid licenses" error at this time. In fact, I was just checking with support on the current overall status for my periodic update of the Top Issues sticky topic, and nothing like that was in their list of top support cases.

[fga]

Congratulations Veeam for pulling nearly 1000 Euros out of our pockets for nothing.
We just bought 2 server agent licences with 3 year support not even 4 weeks ago and what do i see now? getting 6 instances (4 agents on servers!) for free plus 6 vmware sockets on our perpetual licence.
nicely done!
I hope you are ready to refund licences to customers with this change.

[Gostev]

Hello,

AFAIK all sales are final, and there are definitely no grounds for a refund in this case (see EULA for more information).

However, you should work with your sales rep as perhaps they will be able to credit those money somewhere else - for example, to renew support for your VMware socket license. I assume they will be finding a most appropriate solution on a case by case basis.

Thanks!

[Hauke]

Is it true that we will loose workstation licenses with the merge?
Currently we have a 30 workstation agent subscription licenses, the merge tool shows me that this would be converted to 10 instances.
In U4 one workstation is using 0,5 instances.... so...

[Vitaliy S.]

Merge operation does not reduce the number of Agents you were previously licensed to. Depending on the edition the weight of the workload can be different.

Please check out this link for more info: Veeam Licensing Policy (point 2.1.1)

[Hauke]

OK, will check later if other license issues are solved.

A strong advise from me... check if you are the License-Administrator of your licenses BEFORE installation of U4. It's realy hard to get it changed. Veeam's ticket system is even blocking to open cases for the Support-IDs where you are not the License-Administrator... and if you write them a Mail with that issue you are getting back a "open a ticket" answer. Noooo....
Sadly there was no communication from Veeam pointing out the new "permission" system of their portal. Most licenses are assigned to the sourcing department/the person who created the order instead of the IT. We now tried to create a Veeam account for that person to get access to the licenses, but... guess what happened... the mailed activation link for the account gets a "Quoth the Raven - 404" error and is not working.

[Gostev]

A strong advise from me... check if you are the License-Administrator of your licenses BEFORE installation of U4.

Yes, this is documented in the Upgrade Checklist section of the Release Notes, where we advise to obtain the new license before installing the update...

But the good news is, because we knew few will read the release documentation, we also added a 90 days grace period from Update 4 installation date to give you enough time to figure this all out. During these first 90 days, while you still have the old agent license installed, you can use unlimited agents.

[gotsch]

Holy God...

wanted to start some Updates to U4... I am Licensing Admin of my customers.

But for me nothing is clear what changed and until I dont need it, i will not update to U4 and merging licenses or what ever.
Seems like some headquarters have to much time frustrating the admins on field with such a change.
Hopefully, the money earned (with no benefit) will be more than you lose over discouraged customers.

[Gostev]

It's not about making more money, as MSRP does not change - it's about future-proofing Veeam licensing.

[Mgamerz]

I am confused about the free instances on perpetual socket licensing. I have 6 sockets essential with a 5 workstation pack. I do not expect to ever expand my 5 workstation needs (in fact I only use 3). In your original digest about licensing it said you get... 6? free instances with perpetual licensing if you were already a veeam customer before U4 was released. But I can not find any actual documentation on this on veeam support pages. I merged my licenses and I have 10 instances (I have no idea why) with only 1.5 instances used for my 3 workstations. This is very confusing and unintuitive.

Can I just drop the renewals on my workstation licenses since its under the 6 instances I got from socket licensing? I won't lie this licensing change is a big turn off for veeam. I left veritas because I hated the licensing, this shake up is not doing veeam any favors.

[Gostev]

Actually, those two FAQs I linked in the digest explain all changes pretty well.

You have 10 now, because going forward 10 is the minimal bundle you can buy (we won't sell less than 10). Because of that, we round up to the next 10 at no cost during the license conversion for the existing customers. So you can protect more than you could before if you need too, and many customers actually like this fact

Can I just drop the renewals on my workstation licenses since its under the 6 instances I got from socket licensing?

Yes, meaning you can save some of your budget now, thanks to Veeam licensing shake up

[Mgamerz]

Which is great and all, but there is still no way to view the digest unless you got the email. I don't understand why an important piece of information should be this difficult to find. Other companies would just have a blog.

[Gostev]

Agree and in fact, I've just reviewed the BIG one yesterday - so it will be up in a few days!

Thing is, some things we don't necessarily want to communicate all the details and rules widely through the blog posts - because it is in our DNA to quickly iterate on significant changes. We've already made so many tweaks and simplifications to instance licensing in the past 3 weeks based on the initial feedback - and more are still in the pipeline! I love it. Literally 1 hour ago, I shot a Skype message to CEO on another suggested enhancement, and he approved within 15 mins. Only possible at Veeam

[Hauke]

For us everything is cleared now, license owners changed, licenses merged.
I don't understand why we now have more licenses then before, but okay. Nothing I would complain about.
12 Sockets Enterprise + 30 Workstation ----> 12 Sockets + 20 Instances/40 Workstation.

The grace period not worked for us. After Upgrading to U4 you get a license warning - and what is the first thing you try? Importing the old license key. Grace period gone. Also our Workstation licenses expired 2 days after U4 Upgrade, which maybe also breached grace period.