Socket Licensing and Hardware Refresh Concerns

[DPUBeagles]

Hello Veeam Users!

I'm fairly new to the licensing aspect of the Veeam B&R product and have been recently tasked with determining whether we stick with our socket-based licensing or shift to VUL before the upcoming deadline. One of my biggest concerns with sticking with socket-based is how we'd handle a hardware refresh and the adding of new ESXi hosts / migration of VM workloads once those licenses are no longer available for purchase.

As I've been spending a fair bit of time reading through the licensing FAQs and other documentation, I'm aware that socket-based licensing does not allow for any flexibility like VUL does. If I moved a VM to a non-licensed host, no VM backup. Crystal clear.

Before we go and purchase additional socket licenses to give us swing room for host additions, I was hoping to get your guidance on whether this is necessary and/or what hardware refreshes have entailed for you all in the past as you work around socket license limitations.

Thank you!

[nmdange]

Even with growth of the number of VMs in our environment, we have reduced the amount of socket licenses required thanks to increasingly dense hardware. Our current standard hypervisor host is a single-socket AMD Epyc CPU with 32-cores and 1TB of RAM. These replaced older dual-socket Intel Xeon servers with 512gb RAM per host. So on a per-socket basis, we increased the density of VMs per socket by a factor of 4! Is it any wonder why Veeam is discontinuing socket licensing