Socket Licenses are back??

[mkretzer]

I just found this on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments ... _are_back/

Is there anything about this on an official website?

Markus

[Gostev]

I haven't seen anything official on this yet. But indeed there's an intention to allow existing Socket customers to keep expanding them.

[mark49808]

LOL. Too bad we converted all our licenses already, though we did not want to . It made sense as the "least bad" option at the time as we could not buy any more sockets. But now....

[scottf99]

I don't often comments on such things, prefer to stick to technical, but I want to say this is not a good look given that I was put under a LOT of pressure to change away from socket licensing for two companies I look after. Multiple phone calls, emails, quotes. Excessive marketing I would call it, not just your usual renewal reminder. I think the software is great but these revenue driven decisions really stick it to us buyers. I stuck with socket and I would be very unhappy if I had been pressured to change.

[Matts N]

I have a customer with existing socket licenses who received this information, that they will be able to continue buying socket licenses. That is, they are not forced to move to VUL.

[kabe]

We thought that information was a joke, but we also got this infomation. I needn't to say, that all are salty and asked me (Freelancer) why I preached them to convert to VUL or buy sockets last year. April fool!

[Adrian1980]

I haven't seen anything official on this yet. But indeed there's an intention to allow existing Socket customers to keep expanding them.

And now, one last thing you have to do is bring back the edition model for Veeam B&R (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise+) with realistic price models, and all are happy.

[Frank_190]

If this is true, I will not be happy. This cost us real dollars to convert to VULs. Veeam may have a great product but moves like this detract from them as an overall company.

[Gostev]

It's important to realize there's no such thing as "Veeam" in the meaning you put into this word: some central, permanent brain that has been iteratively executing on the same exact agenda for 15 years.

Really, there's no "Veeam" like that. There's only the "current management" at any point in time, who may not always agree with the decisions made by the "previous management", in which case they revise/rollback them. Most big companies go through management team transitions every few years for various reasons and Veeam is no exception: we have been through 3 such transitions since 2016.

And then on top of the "current management" there are the "current owners" who do provide their own input in terms of the definition of success, and this input may change over years - sometimes ever so slightly, and other times dramatically. And this is normal too, as to survive any living organism needs to adapt.

The only constant at Veeam seems to be the R&D team. Clearly this stability helps and thank you for your kind words with regards to what we do

[cschweigert]

Personally, I appreciate when a company is willing to admit it made a poor decision and takes steps to correct it.
Maybe if they are brining back the Core licenses they will consider a similar structure for 365 backup licensing as a per service cost instead of the nonsense per mailbox cost.

Also, Gostev is correct. In my experience Veeam R&D and Support have consistently held their end of the bargain to create and maintain an impressive product, and its the reason we continue to use it.

[BackupBytesTim]

I, for one, totally understand changes in management and how that can affect certain decisions the company makes, however I'll point out that when the company makes changes which require, or in some cases appear they will require in the future, a customer company to spend more money to change licensing. Making a change like that only to then revert it would seem, to me anyways, like just trying to squeeze more money out of customers, you get some people to pay more money, others who are unhappy with the change so they don't and they just sit where they are until they need to get something else. But then the change is undone, allowing the customers who didn't convert licenses to stay, so Veeam doesn't lose customers, but they got extra money from the customers who converted.

So, while I understand changes happen, and sometimes changes get undone, and while this doesn't directly affect the company I'm at now, it still adds to my already negative impression of Veeam. Whether realistic or not, if Veeam were to give people an option to revert all their licenses, with a prorated refund or credit so customers get back any added expense they may have had, that would make the undoing of the license changes seem less nefarious.

I'll be honest though, just because I see a lot of people saying they have a "great experience" and Veeam is a "great product" and it "solved all their issues", for me Veeam is highly problematic vs other software I've used and support is basically useless when it comes to actually fixing anything that I don't already have the capability to fix myself. My colleagues have reported similarly subpar experiences with Veeam support. We actually have internal guidelines on how to deal with Veeam support so as to actually get useful responses because just following the standard procedure of "open a case and send logs" isn't useful. So things like this just degrade an already negative view of the Veeam company and the software they develop.

I imagine that my case doesn't apply to everyone, because honestly I wouldn't touch Veeam with a really long stick if I had a choice in the matter, so I imagine my negative view isn't common, but thought I'd add my opinion just because I'm at this point with Veeam where the company would have to do a lot of a "nice" or "impressive" things in order to actually make like them or the software, and confusing license changes, and the reversions, definitely aren't helping.

I'm aware this is off topic and somewhat ranting, so if it gets deleted I'll understand, but since I saw yet another person claim Veeam to be "impressive" I felt the need to finally comment against it, I see that a lot and always question if those people have used any other software ever, because from my perspective, having used other software, both backup software and non-backup software, Veeam's software is, to be polite, not great.

[Gostev]

Perhaps your negative view isn't common here because everyone commenting in this topic are Veeam Backup & Replication users (as Socket licensing applies only to VBR). While you are a service provider and I see that among the last 3 support cases you opened, one is for the Veeam Service Provider Console and the other two are for Veeam Agent for Mac - which is a new offering so I guess your negative experience with it is understandable. Nevertheless, I've asked our support management to review all cases you opened recently and ensure they were all resolved to your satisfaction.

I do agree it's an offtopic for this particular thread, however you're more than welcome to share details about your experience in the new topics on the corresponding product's subforum - and we would gladly discuss it there and address it in the product. I mean, trust me, it's not like Veeam Backup & Replication was great right away either - it took us many years working diligently through similar negative feedback to get it to where we are today: #1 backup vendor worldwide by market share. That's not to say there's no place for further improvement, there always is!

[mkretzer]

On-Topic: I guess the socket licenses will get way more expensive for the existing customers? Is that at least something that is already known? Is there a way to get back for already migrated, previous socket users?

Off-Topic: About support - We only use Veeam B&R and 365 but after 250 cases in the last 11 years i must say that my experience is very positive. We have had cases where we told support "your product is bad in area X that might only affect 1 % of your customers - but we are willing to help you to make your product better" and then support never told me "not interested" they always went to work with the Devs. Not a lot of companies are willing to do this for such insignificant companies as we are (i still believe the changes help the product to get better for all customers in the long run).

[Gostev]

We don't know details but I think the following predictions are safe to make based on the overall direction:
1. Socket prices will continue to be indexed annually to account for the growing VM/Socket density and high inflation.
2. At the same time I do not expect "way more expensive" type of increases (beyond reasonable as per 1).
3. VUL to Socket migrations are highly unlikely as it means taking customers from being able to protect ANY workload to just VMware and Hyper-V VMs.

[agregersen]

Happy to hear it - we also experienced a massive push towards VUL, but it would be so expensive compared to our socket license (non-enterprise), that it would be the end of us being a veeam customer (we have few hosts, but many small vms). But good point from Gostev about current management.

[ejenner]

In a conversation about licensing it would be forgoing an opportunity not to mention the comedy pricing model for File Server / NAS backup.

[anglerzac]

so glad we resisted all the VUL pressure.

[lando_uk]

What we need now is for socket license holders to be able to access VUL too, so have a hybrid model.

[Gostev]

That has always been available, you could always run a Socket and a VUL license side by side on the same install.

[m.novelli]

Veeam like Microsoft / AWS / Dell / HPe and other IT vendors just try to milk end customers as much as possible, but this has come to an end. They have a blind view based on US market that is completely different from other SMB markets.

For instance the sentence "Socket prices will continue to be indexed annually to account for the growing VM/Socket density and high inflation" make me smile when I think most of my customers have 5 - 7 years old Servers, with the same 5 - 10 VM of 5 years ago. Veeam pricing with VUL has become insane for SMB market.

Marco

[Gostev]

Right, but by how much will their VM/Socket density change when the servers will eventually fall apart after 10 years and they buy modern ones? I'd expect by 200-300% at least. While I don't think Veeam has ever indexed density factor for more than 5% annually (as the other half of price indexation is for the inflation). That's 63% total density factor increase, which is waaay below actual socket density growth. Not even mentioning there were years without any Socket price changes.

But yes, we can all agree that Socket licensing is broken and nothing can be done to fix it. Either Veeam will be losing more and more money, or customers will not be happy with its price increases, or both (the current situation).

[m.novelli]

An SBM Customer with a Dual-Socket Server and 5 - 10 VM when will change a Server will buy... again a Dual-Socket Server or maybe a Single-Socket AMD. Anyway, the minimum Veeam Essentials License is for 2 socket, so Veeam will not lose money. As I told, Veeam have a blind view on US market with customers with hundreds of Servers and thousands VMs

I know, SMB isn't interesting for Veeam

Marco

[Gostev]

I would say, simply unprofitable. Net to Veeam from renewing 2 sockets of Veeam Essentials is less than the cost of processing a single support case, since we have an in-house support. Note that this is even without considering other costs - not sure what are they to process a renewal through a partner but some man-hours on Veeam side are definitely required.

[lando_uk]

That has always been available, you could always run a Socket and a VUL license side by side on the same install.

I asked previously if i can convert a number (e.g. half) of my sockets to VULs at renewal time so i'd have a mixed bag of licenses for the same renewal price. I was told this wasn't possible. Can that happen now?

[Gostev]

Unfortunately, we (R&D) don't know what Socket license migration programs are available now and what are the rules e.g. whether partial migrations are allowed.

[nd39475]

this is good news. last year we renewed per-socket, and intended to renew again. our renewal was more sockets than we actually use just because we did not want to lose the ability if we happened to add more physical sockets as we did not want to get stuck buying VUL's.

However, i did not receive the email referenced.

[tgx]

I would say, simply unprofitable. Net to Veeam from renewing 2 sockets of Veeam Essentials is less than the cost of processing a single support case, since we have an in-house support. Note that this is even without considering other costs - not sure what are they to process a renewal through a partner but some man-hours on Veeam side are definitely required.

Perhaps, but also not a constructive thought process. At one time Amazon.com may have run on a dual socket license.

[Gostev]

I suppose that would be a good argument in a world where vendors didn't have to worry about profitability while waiting for that kind of diamond in a user base. But statistics tells us those companies who don't closely watch their profitability are highly likely to eventually run out of money and so out of business. Giving their growing diamond no choice but to go to their more stable competitor.

[corbitech]

That has always been available, you could always run a Socket and a VUL license side by side on the same install.

Gostev,

Could you please clarify because I was under the impression that it was not possible to run both socket licenses and VUL on the same install. It's been too long now for me to recall accurately, but I believe my impression originated from a past conversation with a Veeam sales rep. What I vaguely recall is that it's not possible to view and manage all Veeam jobs (socket and VUL) under a "single pane of glass" and that separate Veeam instances were required for customers who wanted to run both socket and VUL workloads.

Could you please elaborate on how a customer could manage both socket license workloads and VUL workloads "on the same install"?

Thanks.

[Gostev]

@corbitech sadly, it's a very popular misconception to think this is not possible, even if this was available since VUL was introduced.

How:
You just install both a Socket and a VUL license into the same backup server and get that "single pain of glass" protection for all workloads. Last I checked, we had tens of thousands of Socket customers running their backup servers like that (with additional paid VUL license on top of their Socket license).