Update to U4 licensing dropped a year off support, moved to subscription

[Mgamerz]

I contacted veeam about this, but they say that they don't really deal with anything licensing (what???) so they were not able to help me.

I have 6 sockets perpetual veeam essentials and 5 workstation licenses. I understand workstations are being converted to instance licensing these days... maybe? It is not very clear where I am supposed to read up on changes in licensing, it is all over the place.

Anyways I updated the host to U4 and it says my workstation licenses are moved to grace period, and I need to upgrade my license to a U4 version. So I went to veeam licensing portal and went to the U4 licensing page and clicked merge, since I could not download any licenses. I merged my sockets and my workstation.

I don't know if this is a UI limitation or if there are some additional changes to veeam licensing but now it shows I no longer have ~500 days of support anymore, just 202, which is what my workstation license had. My socket license still had another year and a half remaining, but now the UI says I am on subscription licensing instead.

Is this normal? Is this is a UI issue? Is this an undocumented change? A big reason I switched to veeam was my last product's licensing was a nightmare. I thought veeam's was pretty simple, but this U4 update seems a lot more confusing now.

[nielsengelen]

Did you contact your local sales about this or did you contact support via a licensing case? Normally if you open up a support case for licensing questions, they should be able to assist you and where needed point you out on how to resolve this.

[Mgamerz]

I contacted veeam support with a licensing case. I don't have a case number (I was never given one, but they used my support number to check my licensing status), but essentially once I merged the license (while on the phone) the license page shows my support ends a year earlier than my socket licensing does. The person I was working with essentially said they have no visibility into veeam licensing and was unable to help.

[Gostev]

This is normal: merged licenses have their support expiration set according to the contract that ends first (202 days in your case).

You will still have access to your socket-only license file, and that one will properly reflect remaining support for that particular contract. And if for whatever reason you choose not to renew your agents once their subscription expires, on day 203 you will still be able to use that socket-only license file.

Otherwise, consider co-terming both contracts at your next renewal, so that both end at the same time.

Alternatively, you can migrate your sockets to instances, and have a single licence file with the single Instances counter that will cover all your workloads regardless what Veeam products you use to protect them (since Instance licenses are not product-specific).

The ultimate goal of licensing changes was actually to part from product-specific licenses, and reduce the amount of license counters - think sockets, VMs, servers, workstations, application plug-ins, cloud VMs and upcoming new data sources. This change is required to both further simplify Veeam licensing, but also to make it less rigid. For example, with Instance licensing you will not have to replace your Server agent license with a license for another Veeam product after your migrate one of your physical computers to virtual infrastructure or public cloud.

As is the case with any migration, I of course agree with your perception of added complexity comparing to maintaining status-quo. However, our legacy licensing was really a road to nowhere, even if it was quite simple for basic use cases like your own (with just two types of workloads being protected). And I am sure you will agree with this move a few years from now, where Veeam supports protection of a few times more workloads than we did before - as long as you're still our customer then of course, which we will keep doing our best to ensure!

[Gostev]

P.S. And by the way, nothing is ever final at Veeam: it's in our core values to iterate quickly based on feedback. So, if there's anything we've missed or didn't think through very well with this transition - just let us know, and we will fix or adjust. In the end, our ultimate goal with this change is the same as yours need - total simplicity of Veeam licensing for our clients!

Unfortunately, with 320K existing customers and 12 years of history, we just can't start from a clean sheet. There are sockets, editions, existing products with their own special licenses and so on - and all the complexity you're seeing right now is solely from the fact that we have to deal with all that legacy baggage in the process of this change.

So on one hand, I am really happy we accelerated this change and did it while we still only have 6% of our customers impacted (those with agent subscriptions). I don't even want to start imagining how it would go a year from now, when we'll have a few times more considering new subscription-based offerings being released. But on the other hand, I secretly wish we did it one year ago