Veeam’s VUL Licensing: What You Need to Know

As a Veeam user, you probably understand what Veeam does – silently and brilliantly in the background – but you probably don’t know (or even care) about software licensing of any kind. It’s not really the fun part of working with technology is it?

But fun or not, Veeam have a new licensing model and it is important because it’s entirely replacing their old licensing model. So bluntly, you need to know about this is you want to continue using Veeam – and why wouldn’t you?

We thought we’d take a moment to explain the new model, without all the technical babble. Although if you want technical conversations… Trust us, we can babble.

So what’s new with Veeam?

The licensing model: Now called Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL).

Why on earth have they changed that, it worked okay didn’t it?  

Well, as businesses our applications are now living in multiple locations, usually a mixture of on premise, in the datacentre, or in a public or private cloud. We’ve often had to adopt multiple backup strategies for each application home, which makes management and administration clunky at best.

Veeam have changed their licensing model to a universal platform. It’s one product, one license platform, one console, that covers you for all data locations.

So how’s it changed?

To adapt to these disparate workloads, Veeam has changed the traditional ‘per socket’ licensing model to ‘per instance’ instead. It doesn’t matter what it is or where it lives, if you want to back it up and recover it, then you license it – simple. 

To provide this flexibility, Veeam have moved from the rigid perpetual model to an agile subscription model, making it simple to add licenses on as you need them, but still offering fixed term pricing for customers – so those that operate an OPEX model can be assured of their annual, or multiple year overheads, depending on the term of subscription you wish to commit to. So, if it’s a VM or Cloud VM, a Server or Application Server, a Workstation or a NAS, you license it by the instance. 

So that’s the licensing bit, what else has changed?

Technically, nothing’s changed – Veeam Backup and Recovery and Veeam One for monitoring are still the 2 solutions on offer here, nothing more and nothing less. What Veeam have moved away from is the often confusing ‘Basic, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus’ licensing options.

VUL Backup and Replication comes with all the Enterprise Plus features out of the box – that means storage integration for all users (subject to your storage partner). Backup your storage snapshots and recover them instantly, it saves a lot of time and heartache using this tool, and it’s now included in VUL Backup and Recovery.

Enterprise plus features mean we get the Sandboxing capabilities too, so can now test, backup and recover in isolated environments, ideal for test and dev before rolling out to production. Veeam One is now VUL Availability Suite, that’s Backup and Replication + One = VUL Availability Suite, the full package of monitoring, backup and recovery under one license.

But I don’t need enterprise features?

If you run shared storage, then we’d argue yes you do. Why? Because of Ransomware. Being able to recover from backup is the name of the game, and lots of ransomware does not play fair by hitting your backups as well. Data availability should start with the primary storage, it’s full of powerful capabilities & functionality around the snapshot engine that you can exploit for keeping applications online. You can have a recovery point of 15mins and recover in 3mins with Veeam and your supported storage. It’s your quickest get out of jail card for your most recent data.

If you don’t used shared storage, Veeam’s not abandoned you – they still offer the well heeled and well priced ‘Essentials’ bundle which is ideal for smaller businesses, that need all the functionality of Veeam but for smaller workloads.

I’m sold, how do I migrate my licenses?

Trustco are Veeam specialists and after a quick discussion we can understand your environment and provide you with a quote within 48 hours that’s suitable for your requirements. Just contact your account manager, or talk to the sales team (thy don’t bite) at hello@trustco.co.uk or 0344 8801999