
1 Socket license may be allowing you to backup 50 VM’s. Socket-based licensing can offer excellent value for money if operating a densely subscribed virtual environment. Virtual machine density per physical CPU has increased significantly yet Veeams licensing model has not changed until now. There is no denying that since Veeam started some 10+ years ago, CPU technology has come a long way. Make sense?Īnother question mark around instance licensing is whether or not those lovely perpetual CPU socket based licenses have to be switched out for instance based licenses? Put simply at present, no. So the amount of money required to protect a Server Agent is roughly the same, regardless of license edition.

A Standard Server Agent will consume 3 times as many instances as an Enterprise Plus Server Agent, however again, what is not made clear is that Enterprise Plus will cost about 3 times as much as Standard. The important thing to note here is the license edition type, Standard, Enterprise & Enterprise Plus and the number of instances each workload type will consume. Let’s start with a picture, a picture I refer to a lot when sizing license counts for Veeam products. So what is an Instance license? Veeam have a great article here describing what it is, but what it does not do is explain the conversion rate for instance licenses and when you can and can not use them. Other products like Veeam agent for Windows or Veeam agent for Linux had their own license type associated with them and were classed as subscription-based licenses bought on an annual term as a minimum. Typically bought as a perpetual license, with annual support and subscription attached to it.

Veeam Backup and replication, prior to 9.5 U4, was in one way or another, licensed per CPU socket, be that VMware or Hyper-V.


Please check for yourself with a Veeam representative if further clarification is required. There is more too it than that though, and the reason I am writing this blog post is that I get asked about what on earth an instance license is on an almost daily basis, and I only work for a reseller, not Veeam! What’s the crack then?ĭisclaimer, the information below is my own opinion and what I believe to be correct at time of publishing. The marketing machine at Veeam would have you believe this is a great thing and possibly a money saver as well as getting better value from your existing Veeam investment, which to a degree is true. When Veeam Backup and Replication 9.4 U4 was released in January 2019, it brought with it a new licensing model called Instance licensing.
