Stacking VUL and Capacitiy licences

You will probably get a new license for Veeam to apply that will add the additional quantity for the capacity is my guess.

Hi, thanks. However, I have been guessing for few days.  I need to find somebody who actually knows how this works :-)

VUL licenses come in quantities of 5 or 10 and one workload of 500GB consumes 1 license.  So to have 5TB total you would need a 10 pack.  As per here - Veeam Universal License (VUL)

How Are Licenses Measured?

VUL is packaged in bundles of 5 to 10 portable licenses. Customers consume one license for each workload they choose to protect. That one license will protect any one of the following: ​

• 1 virtual machine (VM)​
• 1 cloud instance/VM​
• 1 database or application

• 1 physical server
• 3 laptops/workstations
• 500 GB of unstructured data

so we have purchased these 6 CPU and we got 6 instances with these 6 CPU which are 500GB chunks. If I get Capacity license 2TB, how that will play with Veeam. Some info is that Veeam will consume only those Capacity licenses and won’t use these from instances ?

I cannot say for sure as I have never stacked licensing within Veeam as it has always been one license for everything.  I would reach out to your sales team to ask the question and get clarity on this.

yes, I reached but they don’t know either 🤷‍♂️

Wow!  What about your SE/SA?  Not sure what to tell you there as they should know.  🙄

I talk to distro, distro talks to Veeam. They are confused. This is what Veeam employee said on Reddit
“They are stackable yes. However, when Capacity counter is present in the license, I believe NAS backup job will consume only Capacity counter and fail once it is exceeded. So I think you're better of migrating existing 6 VUL instances to Capacity licenses.”

I asked how to migrate these to Capacity and how actually this will play out with CPU licenses?

I don’t know why Veeam making this kind of “Oracle licensing”. 

@Chris.Childerhose and to ask you for favor: can you ask your Veeam people about this?

Why not asking directly the person from where will buy the license? That contact of yours must either be a Veeam reseller or a Veeam sales representative.

Both parties can get this information for you and create an offering for you to compare before buying additional licenses.

Best,

Fabian

I did ask. And they ask Veeam guys. Nobody has clue. 

@imadam , I see that you are having a perpetual license for 6 CPU sockets. So you can use this license to backup VMs for a total of 6 CPU sockets for the hypervisors.

Next to that Veeam gave in the past free instance licenses together with your socket license - this was the same number of the CPU sockets with a maximum of 6 instances.

You are using those instance licenses now for the NAS backups : 1 license is 500GB, so you are know backing up 3TB (6x 500GB).

You can’t expand this number because it was given for free.

If you need to backup more than 3TB, you need to buy VUL licenses for 10 licenses because you can’t use those free licenses (instances) anymore. Then you can backup 5TB.

@Nico Losschaert  Thanks. So, if I am reading this right, there is no way to stack Capacity licenses on top of this. If I add capacity licenses, they will render these free 6x500GB unusable. In addition to this ,my understanding is that even with VUL licenses I can’t expand this 3TB to 5TB buy adding required number of VUL license? 

So my options are:

• to buy VUL package which allows me backup of 5 TB (10 instances x 500GB)

or

• buy 5TB capacity licences 

?

I believe you need to buy 10 VUL licenses to accomplish what you need not capacity licensing.

@Chris.Childerhose why? since those 3 TB (6 x 500GB free instances) are anyway rendered unusable either way, should I be able to buy capacity licenses? 

Is there limitation in this Veeam installation where I must use as you said 10 VUL?

Like I said I have never stacked licenses so a new capacity license for what you need might work on top of the current VUL license. I am not saying you cannot just I have never done this before.  In both cases either should technically work.  I don't have licenses to test this right now but I can tomorrow if you still want a definitive answer.  I will just use Pulse to create a capacity license and add to me homelab server to see.

@Chris.Childerhose  I don’t have luxury of testing this. It would be great if you can test it. Thank you.

I will try tomorrow to test and see.