[VEEAM] v10 licensing – what you need to know
The long-awaited Veeam Availability Suite v10 is here and we’re extremely excited. We’re also honored and grateful that you’ve joined us for this ride. Many of you have also witnessed our journey to licensing portability along the way, and v10 is really the culmination of those benefits from both a product and a licensing perspective. So, what is it that you need to know to make your adoption of version 10 a success? Let’s dive in.
Veeam license options
The Veeam Universal License (VUL) is our most capable licensing solution and includes the most powerful Enterprise Plus capabilities. VUL is a portable, consumption-based license that is metered per protected workload and is sold in bundles of 10 licenses. With the added portability, VUL literally allows you to protect all Veeam Backup & Replication workload types interchangeably, both on premises and in the cloud. This helps you meet your ever-changing environment needs in the most flexible way possible.
As many of you know VUL received a major enhancement in October, making it even easier to use, while lowering the price too. We are pleased with the adoption we’ve seen and appreciate your help in making VUL better. VUL is transacted as an annual subscription with 1-5 year options, paying upfront or 3-5 year terms if paying annually.
Per-Socket licensing is an option for customers looking to protect only VMware or Hyper-V VMs on premises and is measured per CPU socket and transacted perpetually. Sold in Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, socket licenses offer a wide range of capabilities for protecting VMware and Hyper-V VMs.
For our VCSPs, the Rental Agreementsoffer cloud and managed service providers many of the portability/flexibility benefits of Subscription, but with the added twist of pay-as-you-grow pricing and a dedicated license type that extends usage rights to managed and protect third-party data. With v10, VUL and VCSP Rental Pricing are in total harmony, unified under a simplified points-based structure (included in the license file itself) that covers BaaS and DRaaS for any customer and any workload, across any cloud.
What do you need to know for v10?
If you’re a completely new Veeam customer with v10, welcome to the family! You’re good to go. For the rest of you long-term Veeamers, there are some great changes in v10 that we’d like to highlight.
There are tons of new features and improvements in v10. Arguably the hottest new capability of v10 is our NAS (Network Attached Storage) file protection capability. Support for NAS is a great option for a broad set of customers and is achieved with VUL. With 1 VUL license, you can protect 250GB (4 licenses per TB). If you already have VUL licenses, you can use those to protect NAS today!
If you’re using agent-based jobs to protect Microsoft Windows or Linux servers and workstations today, your license is likely already either VIL or VUL, so no action is required – simply download the updated v10 license file.
Our standalone offering for Nutanix AHV has been a hit, so much so that we’ve pulled that product into Veeam Backup & Replication management umbrella. Now it’s simply referred to as the Veeam Backup & Replication Nutanix AHV backup proxy (coming very soon) and is licensed with VUL. There is no need to purchase unique licensing for protecting Nutanix AHV VMs. VUL is portable and meets the flexibility needs of customers looking to adopt AHV or change hypervisors.
License files at V10
Like with all previous major releases, Veeam Availability Suite v10 does require all users, for both VUL and socket licenses, to update their license file immediately at v10 install. This is simple and can be done in the product or in a license portal. This is now accomplished easier than ever, in most cases automatically.
Existing subscription customers
If you have VIL Subscription licenses, today may be your lucky day. Effective immediately, those VIL licenses will be upgraded to full-featured VUL licenses at no cost, regardless of edition. That’s right, Standard and Enterprise VIL license holders are now upgraded to fully-featured VUL licenses with Enterprise Plus feature set. There’s no caveats or extra cost associated with this change. When your existing contract is up, you’ll need to renew at market VUL price. The great thing about this is that we’ve reduced our prices for VUL by up to 33% and, most importantly, it costs less than ever to protect ANY server, workstation, cloud workload or enterprise app. Check your portal and these should be upgraded for you and ready to use.
Lastly, some may be aware that protecting the same workloads with both host-based and agent-based jobs previously required using 2 licenses. With v10, that is no longer a requirement, and there is no longer any double charging for protecting the same workload – so long as the protection is managed by the same backup server.
Service providers
There is also a host of new benefits, discounts and more for VCSP Rental users. Check out our VCSP Launch Resource Center for more info.
Existing socket license customers
We love our socket customers and we have some great news on this front. Many of our socket customers see the benefits of our portable VUL licensing and are starting to merge environments with both perpetual socket and subscription VUL licenses. Previously we required the editions to match, but now VUL doesn’t have an edition, it’s fully featured just like Enterprise Plus. We now allow customers to merge sockets and VUL licenses across a variety of products, in a centrally managed environment. However, please note that the Socket license edition still dictates the edition capabilities of the entire environment. If this is an impediment for you, there are two options:
- Migrate your sockets to VUL for the cost of your renewal here
- Upgrade the edition of your sockets to Enterprise Plus
Protect more with free licenses! For customers who have socket licenses, you may be aware that we’ve provided extra instance licenses, 1 per protected socket, up to 6, for you to try at no cost since 9.5 U4. Well, with v10 those are now VUL licenses, which allows Standard and Enterprise edition customers to protect slightly more workloads than before. We encourage you to experience the benefits of protecting physical, cloud and enterprise app workloads for yourself. As with v10, these can be used for NAS too!
Finally, we’re pleased to announce that with v10, these gifted licenses will no longer expire when you purchase additional instances. They are forever yours, no strings attached. We want you to have your cake and eat it too.
V10 centralized license management and merge updates
When we launched the VUL predecessor in early 2019, hybrid environments required merging socket and instance licenses (VUL) into a single license file. Our customers saw that as an unneeded complication – so based on the feedback, we’re bringing the ability to install and manage socket and VUL license files separately in v10. So if, like most Veeam customers, you have a socket license now, and decide to purchase an additional VUL licenses to protect non-VM workloads – you can just drop that new license into your existing backup server!
Summary
VUL is the future of licensing at Veeam, giving you all the features and all the portability in one license type. If you have questions about license changes in v10, we have the detailed Licensing section in the What’s New document.
Still have questions? Please contact our renewals team. If you’re ready to go, download v10 and get started now! Thanks again for being VeeAmazing users, we hope v10 makes achieving your business objectives easier than ever. Until next time.
sanderdaems
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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