Upgrading B&R to v10 - licensing free agent

[rrober]

Hi all,

TL;DR at the bottom.

Apologies for such an elementary question, and for the headscratching title.
I'm looking at upgrading our B&R 9.5U4 installation to v10. The pre-installation guide mentions:

Are you using an instance license to protect some of your vSphere or Hyper-V VMs with agent-based backup jobs in presence of a socket license? As an enforcement of the existing licensing policy, hosts where such VMs are running will require and consume socket licenses with Veeam Backup & Replication 10. This may result in your agent-based backup jobs failing after the upgrade due to insufficient socket licenses.

I currently have 8 CPU sockets licensed for a Hyper-V cluster. However, I have a few less important physical and virtual servers outside of the licensed cluster that I've been using the Free agent for, backing them up to the primary backup repository. My license overview shows 1 instance (x1.50) as being active. This is a physical server with the free agent installed on it. A different physical server with the free agent, installed in what I thought was the same way, does not consume an instance.

This leaves me confused whether I'm violating licensing agreements. If I am, I'd obviously prefer to true-up and/or re-evaluate whether I even want these machines backed up prior to upgrading to v10.

Thanks in advance for any help

Kind regards,
Richard

TL;DR: Does the free agent consume licenses when they target a backup repository using B&R v10? Also, why is one of my physical servers with the free agent consuming an instance, but the other one isn't?

[veremin]

No, you do not violate licensing policy, because

- agent pointed to backup repository does consume licenses
- with each socket-based licenses we provide gifted instance for free (one per licensed socket, up to 6 max)
- and these gifted instances are consumed by physical servers your back up

Thanks!

[rrober]

Thank you for the reply!

A few follow-up questions if you don't mind:

- With the 1.50x multiplier I assume the 6 free instances let me back up four physical servers with agents, regardless of it being the paid or free agent?
- Does backing up virtual machines using the free agent (on non-licensed hosts) consume the same instances at the same multiplier?
- If I wanted to increase the number of instances can I buy extra ones?
- Do you know why one of my physical servers is consuming an instance license and the other one isn't?

Thanks again!

[Mildur]

Veeam V10 will consume only 1 instance for each physical server
Physical workstation will be 1 instance for three workstations.

[veremin]

Mildur is correct here, in version 10 we've simplified licensing model, so previous licensing weights are not applicable any longer:

Veeam Universal License (VUL): v10 uses portable, universal license which comes in the single fully-featured
edition and no longer uses a weighting table, with every workload consuming one instance. This dramatically
simplifies license management and portability

Thanks!

[ecorec]

Veeam V10 will consume only 1 instance for each physical server
Physical workstation will be 1 instance for three workstations.

Is it the same for V11?
Now in 10 (community edition) I have, under license informations - instances

Code: Select all

Type	Count	Multip	Instances
VMs	6	1	6
Servers	2	1	2

Will I get some (bad or good) surprise upgrading to V11?

[Mildur]

Yes, it will be the same for V11 (V11a).