Veeam Licensing

[cerberus]

We have an instance of Veeam B&R 9.5 Update 4 in production, 6 socket license to backup our 3-node ESXi cluster.

Are there any licensing rights granted to have a 2nd instance of the Veeam product installed in a hot DR site for restore validation purposes (making sure we can restore production Veeam backups in our DR site).

I guess the other option would be to just install the free Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition but not sure if there will be some feature limitations (such as restoring from LTO tape, etc.).

[Gostev]

This is covered in the sticky FAQ topic, kindly please review it carefully before creating new topics.

In short, we don't license individual components, so you can install as many backup servers as your use case requires. The only thing that matters is that your total socket consumption does not exceed the total number of licensed sockets.

[cerberus]

Thanks gostev,

Since i'd only be doing a restore from tape to disk (and not to my DR cluster) I should be OK then as I wouldn't have enough socket licensing to restore back into the virtual environment.

I wonder if Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition would be better situated in this scenario.

[Gostev]

Well, I have to again refer you to the same FAQ chapter re: when license gets consumed. In short, we don't license restores at all, so you don't need to worry about having "enough sockets for restores".

Moreover, at least as far as paid licenses go - while you CAN have multiple independent Veeam licenses, you have to use them in different backup infrastructures which are not sharing backups, servers or storage and protecting different source infrastructure. I need to check what is CE story in that regard, but overall this tells me you're better off using your existing license for DR site, because going this route is for sure fine for your specific use case.