Licensing

[Yuki]

A little confused on Essentials licensing

We have a client who uses Essentials kit. They have 2 servers on-site - one primary, one with replicas and backups are stored on a NAS.

We want to install Veeam Proxy agent on remote server at a datacenter in order to do backups/replication over WAN. Does this count as the 3-d server? Can we keep the essentials kit at primary site and purchase another essentials for remote site (will two setups be allowed to communicate considering they will be on difference lincese keys?)

[Vitaliy S.]

You need to license ESX(i) hosts you're backing up/replication VMs from.

We want to install Veeam Proxy agent on remote server at a datacenter in order to do backups/replication over WAN.

What VMs are you going to replicate offsite? VMs located on the remote site (over the WAN) or production VMs you're already backing up?

[Yuki]

Most likely the replicas from the "Stand-by" / "dark" server, but can go either way. Right now our on-site replication is done every hour Monday-Friday. The backups are done daily after business hours.
But if there was some reason to replicate "live" systems we could do that too.

Ok, yes, there are 2 components at play - VMware and Veeam.

We will take care of vmware licensing obviously... but how does veeam license? Do we need to reserve 2CPU license for remote site where veeam proxy agent will be installed for receiving backups and replicas? It will only be used as destination, never as source of backups or replication.

[Gostev]

Do we need to reserve 2CPU license for remote site where veeam proxy agent will be installed for receiving backups and replicas? It will only be used as destination, never as source of backups or replication.

Hi Yuki, have you had a chance to review the Licensing section in the sticky FAQ topic? The very first entry there answers this question specifically.

[Yuki]

I haven't done it in a while, but now have reviewed and it answered a part of my question. I see that we don't need to license it.

On the other hand we will be purchasing VMware license and might as well license Veeam to in order to be able to backup this server if we ever have to fail over to it.

I assume there is no problem in pushing data between two servers licensed separately?

[Gostev]

Yes, because licensing does not care about target hosts.