Licensing - Poor Experience

[slmacquarie]

Today I've come in to find that Veeam failed to backup my environment because I replaced ESXi hosts last week. I understand the desire to ensure license compliance and prevent piracy, but perhaps it would be best to err on the side of caution and give your customers the benefit of the doubt for a short while. I expected some very obvious warning signs, both in the UI and an issue-specific email, for perhaps a week before the software went on strike.

To be clear, at no point was there more ESXi hosts with vm's than there were licenses, and I've since discovered how to fix it - I'm just annoyed that it happened at all. Ironically, a pirated version would have probably given a better experience in this case.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Shane, thanks for your feedback. License is assigned/checked in the beginning of the backup job, that's why you saw the error message only when the job started. How did you replace ESXi hosts? Did you remove them from the backup console and then added new ones or you just swapped the hardware?

[slmacquarie]

Thanks for the reply. One at a time, I migrated VM's from one host to another, removed the old host from VCSA (maintenance mode, removed from inventory) and added the new host to VCSA and migrated VM's to the new host. Rinse and repeat. Veeam is setup to use the VCSA, and I didn't see any obvious way to remove specific hosts - I believed it automatically updated from VCSA, and indeed it appears that it did because the new servers were shown in Veeam and the old servers were then absent.

[Vitaliy S.]

Shane, yes I see your point, thanks for clarifications. The situation you've run into is common for socket based licensing, where license key is assigned to a host. When you need to replace a host, the license revoke operation also needs to be performed. To make this operation more user-friendly (host upgrade etc), we have introduced a per-VM licensing model (subscription), which assigns the license key to a VM and not to a host. So in case of a host migration/hardware upgrade the license key will always be preserved to a VM (assuming that VM ID does not change) and backup jobs should not fail. Thank you for your feedback.