People value flexibility. We demand it! Our lives are busy, and we strive to keep things simple no matter where we are. Whether it’s how we shop, how we consume information or how we interact with friends and family, we expect that experience to be the same whether we’re at home or on the go. That’s the same for organizations who are growing and stretching their business-critical workloads across multiple environments and into the cloud. They need flexibility! They need a consistently reliable experience that does not incur penalties and doesn’t increase costs.
Veeam is stoked to introduce a new licensing solution that will provide a simple, flexible and cloud-ready licensing option that breaks down barriers for cloud adopters needing to back up and restore their valuable workloads. Veeam Instance Licensing (VIL) is the newest subscription licensing solution for Veeam products.
VIL is portable and can be used to protect various workloads across multiple Veeam products and can be used on premises, in the public cloud and anywhere in between.
Let’s first step back and discuss how this came about and why you should care.
Veeam 2019 – Extending leadership in cloud data management!
Organizations have various types of workloads ranging from virtual to physical, on-premises to cloud-native, and test/dev to production enterprise applications. Veeam has a portfolio of various products ready to support the total Availability of all these workloads, with backup and replication, monitoring, and much more. January 22nd marked a massive set of announcements from Veeam that extends our leadership in cloud data management. This announcement included Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4, Veeam Agents for Microsoft Windows and Linux v3, Veeam Availability for AWS and more. These releases were huge, adding many new cloud features furthering the capabilities that our customers demand. In fact, this was the biggest release in our history in terms of number of new features — check out the list for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 alone here.
Workload diversification is on the rise
Organizations are moving rapidly toward an increasingly diverse set of workloads ranging from virtual to physical, on-premises to cloud-native, and test/dev to production enterprise applications. This workload diversity is fueled the most by the accelerating trend toward hybrid and multi-cloud adoption. Customers are adopting clouds in various ways in order to gain greater flexibility, cost savings and advanced functionality. These diverse configurations are contributing to challenges to how customers manage their traditional and cloud-native environments, and this applies directly to licensing as users are now facing a myriad of different licensing requirements. Different licenses for different workloads and for different products made for a licensing nightmare. Some licenses could be used for some things, but not others. Other licenses couldn’t be repurposed. Veeam is responding to this concern proactively with a solution that addresses licensing complexities to make the move to multi-cloud environments simple with VIL.
What is Veeam Instance Licensing?
VIL is the next generation of subscription licensing at Veeam, replacing the existing subscription licensing for most products. It’s a solution that can be used across different workloads and different Veeam products. These licenses are sold in pools of licenses, in bundles of 10. Customers use these instances to license the workloads that they need. Need to protect 3 VMs, 2 agent servers, and 2 cloud native workloads on AWS? No sweat! One bundle of VIL licenses can do this for you regardless of what Veeam product you choose for protecting your workload. No need to purchase “product-specific” licensing any longer.
You can probably already see how it solves some real challenges. For example, imagine you have a special VM that cannot be snapshot due to hypervisor limitation around its virtual hardware? No problem — you can just use Veeam Agent to protect this VM with agent-based backup, while processing the rest with host-based backups that Veeam Backup & Replication is so famous for — all from a single pool of licenses.
But, the best part is the portability! You can move these licenses to the workloads that you need, when your needs change, wherever your workload resides. Today, your SQL Server may be running on physical — but in a few months, you may virtualize it on VMware. And perhaps in a few months, you have plans to move it to the public cloud? No problem — the Veeam license will follow, regardless of what Veeam product you decided to use for protecting your on-prem VMs, physical servers, workstations, cloud IaaS VMs or enterprise applications. No longer will you be locked into licensing that is product or workload-specific.
Here at Veeam, we feel this portability is the right thing for the customer and we firmly believe this will make purchasing and managing licenses easier than ever. Fewer licensing headaches, greater flexibility, simplified ordering and management. That just makes sense!
Ok, but what is an Instance?
An Instance is our new unit of measurement for subscription licensing. Our most common use case is protecting a VM, and that will always utilize 1 Instance. In fact, most workloads require 1 Instance with our flagship Enterprise Plus edition, making everything super simple. Instead of metering licenses across various metrics such as per VM, per server, per workstation, per application, per user, per this and per that.. (Gosh, that’s exhausting!) we are standardizing on the license Instance as our unit of measure.
Just like our products, Instance licensing will be offered by edition. While this adds some complexity, this is a necessary evil to accommodate our existing 320K+ customer base using different product editions. However, for new purchases, you will find that Enterprise Plus edition is the best choice, because it provides more platform capabilities at the same price. This is due to how Instance pricing is structured, with MSRP for all workloads (except VMs) staying the same regardless of the edition.
It’s better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times, right? Well, we have a nifty Instance configurator to help you figure out how many Instances you need. Check it out or contact your sales associate or your partner for assistance.
The. Price. Is. Not. Changing!
There must be some hitch here, right? Nope. The subscription pricing is not changing for any of our products. It costs the same to protect each particular workload as before — when we first introduced subscription licensing.
However, please remember that the Instances are sold by edition, and while lower editions may have increased “weightings” for certain workloads, this does not result in 2-3x the cost. Let’s take the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows server for example. No matter what edition you purchase, the cost to protect an Agent server is still $150 USD MSRP no matter what edition you choose. A Veeam Agent for Linux workstation is $50 MSRP regardless of edition. Same goes for Nutanix VMs which is $150 USD. Three standard Instances will protect one server and one Enterprise Plus Instance will protect one Server. The weighting per edition is different, but the price stays the same.
If you need various workload types to be centrally managed, we just require that you keep the edition the same across the single license file.
What else do you need to know?
- Veeam Instance Licensing is available for several products and workloads, check out the list here. Is your product or workload not on this list, such as the case for Veeam Availability Orchestrator or Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365? No sweat — keep licensing those the way they are today.
- Subscription Licenses will no longer be sold “by product,” because they can be used for ANY product, but rather in a pool of Instances in minimum bundles of 10.
- Customers can now, for the first time, have both Perpetual and Subscription licensing in the same environment. This was a huge request before — and we made it happen!
- Perpetual licensing IS NOT going away! Continue using Perpetual, per socket, licensing for your VMs on premises. BONUS: We’re even going to give you up to 6 instances to kick the tires of Agents, Availability for AWS and more with no strings attached!
- Legacy subscription licenses will be converted to Instances and upon installing Update 4, these customers will be asked to update their license file and will have a 90-day grace period to do this. Those of you who have both perpetual and agent licenses, this applies to you too, but you’ll also need to merge your licenses into the single file. After upgrading to Update 4, you will have 90 days to get your legacy agent license replaced with an Instance license — and until you do, you can use unlimited agents. So, don’t worry if you run into any license management issues — our licensing support department is here to help.
Summary
Veeam continues to raise the bar and do what is right for our customers. Licensing is becoming more portable for the masses and no longer a barrier for multi-cloud users. Learn more about VIL on our Instance licensing page and check out our Instance license configurator. 2019 is off to a great start and we are so excited about what lies ahead. Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 and its complementary products are cloud-ready and so is our licensing solution. Let us help you achieve your goals in 2019!
See more:
- On-Demand Sessions from VeeamON Virtual
- Coming soon Veeam Backup & Replication for AWS
- Veeam Instant Licensing policy
- VAS Update 4 and Veeam Instance Licensing press release