Veeam is getting ready to launch AHV support but... | Nutanix Community
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With this new product comes a change to how Veeam licenses their products. All new products released this year will be per VM only and socket licensing is gone. As I understand it, customers who already have socket licenses will be able to renew their product, but what if they jump to AHV? I'm pretty sure Veeam counts this as a new contract as you purchase Veeam with your Hypervisor type. This means you too may likely move to a per VM model of licensing.



But, isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it reduce my costs? That is up for debate per environment. I just wrote my Veeam account rep about this licensing change and gave him the reasons why I don't want a per VM licensing model as a Veeam customer. Here's a copy of that message. Think about this for a moment:



Veeam Rep,



I want you to not charge me per VM and offer me socket licensing like we had approved. It’s clearly a model made by executives who are out of touch with how businesses operate and only thinking about how to make a quick buck. Moving to this licensing model will make us have machines that are unprotected for at least a period of time, if not indefinitely in some cases, and if we buy with this licensing type, it will force our Director of IT to implement a VM control policy limiting IT’s ability to spin up machines before undergoing a lengthy approval process because you just single handedly attached a hard cost to a VM. More than just increasing our TCO, this licensing type is bad news for our engineering team and positions us to have to constantly make a case about the business need to spin up a VM for anything we do. Further, it will force us to cut our total number of VMs by consolidating services to single machines which hinders our ability to make realistic maintenance windows a reality per application. This becomes a problem as VM consolidation of applications means I need buy in from more stakeholders to do a simple maintenance window.



Pay as you go systems only help those who have smaller environments by allowing pricing to scale down and enjoy the software benefit with a cost that suites their environment size. Pay as you go increases costs and hinders our ability to forecast. It also shifts our purchase from capex/opex split to solely opex which we have not been approved to do, so we would have to get creative and find a way to allocate funds appropriately.



Many businesses have moved to the cloud for the promise of the “Pay as you go” system, only to realize costs were way higher than anticipated and had to move right back to traditional hardware. This is why our upgrade was to bring Nutanix in-house, and not just go to AWS/Azure. These systems work great for small business, but for us this pricing model is a budgeting and logistical nightmare. Additionally, this licensing model allows us to become out of compliance more easily which means Veeam will be seeing an increase in dollars made when auditing customers. If socket licensing goes away and customers are required to count their VMs there will be a dramatic uptick in your revenue stream from techs who don’t know the rules and get audited by Veeam. Socket licensing simplifies all of this. VM count licensing does nothing for us, your customer, and gives you everything. Did I mention you’re asking me to pay more money for the product, and we don't even own it? Solarwinds pulls this crap with us and it’s constantly got me going and asking for more money so I can buy another piece of the puzzle to accomplish some task I need done and every time I have to stake a very good case or I get denied and can’t get the benefit. They have a great product but due to their licensing model alone, I want to delete the VMs, low level format the data disks, rip up the contract, take it into the facilities and wipe my ass with it.



That is the pricing model I'm being forced me into now.




Thoughts?
Hi Ibanez1998,



Full disclosure I work for Veeam Software. I am going to answer your queries and concerns below. But please reply with any further feedback.



“All new products released this year will be per VM only and socket licensing is gone”



Per Socket licensing has not gone from the price list, it is still very much available for VMware and Hyper-V on any platform. All new products that have been released have not had a defined state when it comes to sockets, office 365 for example, this has to be on a per user as there is no underlining socket based licensing.



“customers who already have socket licenses will be able to renew their product, but what if they jump to AHV?”



Existing Veeam customers using Nutanix on either VMware or Hyper-V will have the ability to convert their socket-based licensing to per-VM instances this will be done on a 1 socket to 20 VM ratio. We believe this to be a more than adequate density to convert to. This is not counted as a new contract.



The other way to look at this is our agents and pricing model, these are here to protect workloads that reside on physical systems as well as cloud instances where we do not have access to the underlining hypervisor, this could also be true of Veeam today (pre-GA version of Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV) where agents can be used to protect those virtual machines where we do not have access to the underlining hypervisor.



One other thing to mention is that if you are a Veeam customer looking to migrate or convert to Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV then you will get that ratio previously mentioned you will also receive the same Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows or for Linux options for the same equivalent amount of VMs to choose which you would prefer to use.



For example, if you currently today have a 10 socket Veeam license then you would be entitled to a 200 VM Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV license as well as 200 Veeam Agent Server edition, however you will only be entitled to use 200 instances from the pool, this is to allow for those workloads that would benefit from an agent being present over the agentless approach. An example here would be a Microsoft Exchange server where there is a requirement to truncate logs, the agentless approach in v1 does not give us the ability to do so, but the agent would be better aware and capable of protecting those workloads and truncating logs. In this instance you would use an agent license and minus 1 from the overall 200 licenses available.



Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Plus edition with zero counters to give access to recovery options and backup repositories will also be included as part of the overall offering.



If you have any further questions please reply and we will help,
Hi @ibanez1998



Did you see the reply from @michaelcade - let me know if you need anything additional.



BTW - will you be at .NEXT in London? would be great to connect and answer any additional questions in person.
I expect I will be in London for the event.
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