Veeam Licensing / vCenter / CPUs

[Frosty]

I have a question about licensing.
Until today I have been running Veeam v4 and had a 4-CPU licence for my 2 x 2-CPU ESX v3.5 hosts.
I am now about to start migration to some new infrastructure, so I have purchased 2 additional licences and I will be running Veeam v5 and have licences for 6-CPUs for my 3 x 2-CPU ESXi v4.1 hosts.
Clear as mud?
I'm in the process of commissioning my new backup system and have built a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 VM and have installed Veeam v5 with 6-CPU-licences on it.
But I need to keep my old infrastructure going whilst I prove up the new processes and then gradually migrate my VMs over from the old hosts.

Q. is it possible to add both my new vCenter v4.1 (6-CPU) AND also temporarily add my old vCenter v2.5 (4-CPU) to Veeam v5 (just for the duration of my migration project)?

This would enable me to decommission my old backup system immediately, as I could set up my backups all on the new VM. Once the migration is finished my old hosts will be reconfigured and sent off to storage for Disaster Recovery purposes, so I will then be back to 6-CPUs again.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Stephen,

You can request a trial license file via our sales representative for a standalone backup server and then use both servers to migrate your VMs.

Thanks.

[Frosty]

Awesome ... thanks Vitaly ... that would work great!

[Frosty]

Got my temp 10-CPU licence. Migrated my servers to the new infrastructure over the weekend. Am getting massive improvements both in underlying disk performance (from my new SAN) but also major improvements in backup performance from Veeam v5 ... I'll take some measurements and post again when I am certain of the improvement, but it looks to have cut about 6 hours off my nightly backup window which is fantastic.

[Vitaliy S.]

Stephen, looking forward to seeing the results from you. Glad that you've finished the migration successfully.

[Frosty]

OK, preliminary results from the first complete daily backups run which happened last night. In the past we had to start our backups at 2pm because of our horrible SAN, in order to get them done in time. The last one would finish at approximately 5:30am. A number of servers also had to be backed up just once per week instead of daily because of the poor SAN performance. It took us a total of 17+ hours to backup everything. The subsequent file copying to portable USB HDD for offsite storage was staggered throughout this period, so as to finish around 9:30am each morning.

At the weekend, post-migration, I made sure to set up backup jobs for all my VMs and ran them once. Last night (Monday) I ran backups for ALL the VMs sequentially, starting at 5pm, staging most of them at roughly 5-minute intervals, with the exceptions being our mail server starting at 6pm and main file server starting at 7pm.

The whole lot were finished by 7:20pm. That's 2hrs, 20mins ... 140 minutes ... vs more than 1000 minutes on the old infrastructure ... a whopping improvement of 86%.

This means that we can start our copies of VMs to USB at 9pm comfortably, which will see them finishing somewhere before 5am.

So I've cut a total of 4.5 hours off the back end of my backup window (5am finish vs 9:30am) and 3 hours off the front end of the backup window (5pm vs 2pm) ... a total saving of 7.5 hours.

New SAN and VM performance accounts for a big chunk of the savings (its performance is 2-3 times the old one, with improvements in read performance plus benefits from writing to a 6-disk RAID instead of a stand-alone physical SCSI disk)

But I've also observed that running Veeam v5 as a VM and using Virtual Appliance Mode with CBT has boosted performance massively. As examples:

MAIL SERVER ... old backup took 5hr 10min (22MB/sec) ... new backup took 1hr 15min (93MB/sec)

FILE SERVER ... old backup took 5hr 20min (24MB/sec) ... new backup took 21min (367MB/sec)

[Gostev]

Nice, thanks for real world numbers, always great to see them. What backup mode are you using? If default (regular incremental), be sure to also wait for syntetic full day, as this will take siginificantly longer time than regular incremental run to complete (not a problem though, since I am sure you have scheduled this for your weekend). But, if you are using reversed incremental, then it is going to take the same amount of time every day obviously.

[Frosty]

I am using the Reverse Incremental backup mode. I guess I kind of got used to that in v4 and have stayed with it.

[vargispa]

Hi,

Recently I started working with Veeam backup & replication. I am not aware how licensing is calculated in Veeam. Appreciate if anyone say the unit of measurement and how it is calculated.

I can see in the license mentioned as

Number of CPUs=24
Number of machines=1

Thanks in advance

[Vitaliy S.]

We use per ESX(i) host socket licensing model. If you need to know more information on the license workflow please review our User Guide (pages 46-48)

[iroche]

[merged]

I have a question regarding licensing, we are going to be adding and removing servers from our setup over the next month or so. We have a couple of R900s with 4 sockets which will be removed and we will be adding a couple of M710s (2 socket systems) , I was wondering if its possible o protect these servers with Veeam unlicensed for a week or two until we move the R900s out which will then free up the required amount of licenses to protect these servers?