VUL no longer full featured?

[Valdereth]

I feel like one of the value propositions to upgrade to VUL versus staying on a socket edition license was VUL is full featured. As a partner, this was great news, if I was working with VUL client I no longer had to worry about which features were/weren't included with their license. I could review 'What's New' documents with each release and understand that my VUL clients were able to take advantage of the VBR features on release. After recently updating a client to 12.3 and being kept from Threat Hunter, I'm worried Veeam may be reversing their decision on this.

To sanity check, I dug into the VUL FAQs, and found references to full featured. So I know my memory is correct in the proposition.

So I'm surprised to find out that Threat Hunter is being withheld from VUL Foundation. My client was looking forward to the security benefits added to 12.3 around malware detection, but when we went to the settings a warning indicated that it was only for Essentials, Advanced, or Premium license.

I understand certain VBR features requiring a higher VDP edition, especially the ones reliant on the other products (Threat dashboard requires ONE, etc). But Threat Hunter works without ONE, or Recovery Orchestrator.

Anyone else notice this? Are we going back to restricting features from VBR until you get into higher VDP editions?

[Gostev]

I introduced this "fully featured" term many years ago when we first launched VUL, in order to explain to existing customers that they get the functionality of top Socket edition (Enterprise Plus) when migrating to VUL. Today VUL remains "fully featured" in that original sense, still providing the same level of features and capabilities as the Enterprise Plus edition of Socket-based licenses.

And just like before VUL, advanced capabilities that go beyond basic (foundational) backup and recovery features require higher VDP edition. Before VUL or VDP existed, this higher platform edition was called Veeam Availability Suite (VAS). VAS positioning was "Monitoring and Reporting" and now its successor VDP Advanced is positioned as "Monitoring, Analytics and Advanced Cyber Resilience" (something like this, from my memory).

Threat Hunter does in fact "rely on other product" in your own terms, even if it's so tightly integrated into VBR. Thus it's similar to say Threat Center dashboard you've already mentioned. Plus there's significant added costs to Veeam associated with Threat Hunter functionality: if you read details in the What's New in 12.3 then you know it's really a service rather than a static feature.