LUV:VUL – What happened to Veeam Instance Licensing?

Background

I wrote about Veeam Instance Licensing and it’s pros and cons back in April this year. The premise was great, the execution of it, not so much.

It was confusing to work out how many licenses you needed, what license edition you needed, would perpetual licensing go away, etc, etc. If you got past all of that though, it was a great model to help protect workloads in this Hybrid IT world we live in now, where data mobility is the norm. One license to rule them all, physical, private or public cloud, VIL had you covered.

Veeam Universal License

Enter VUL. One of the reasons I am passionate about Veeam is that they take feedback seriously and act upon it. I wasn’t the only one to make grumblings about the VIL model being too complicated. Veeam Universal Licensing takes the VIL concept and massively simplifies it, which I will get onto shortly.

Veeam is constantly expanding its product portfolio to cater to new workload types. It’s not just Hyper-V and VMware backups anymore, where licensing per CPU socket made/makes sense. There are physical workloads both Windows and Linux based, cloud workloads, NAS backup, to name but a few, where a more flexible licensing model is required. The Veeam Universal License is a single license type that can be used across them all. I don’t know about you, but having to deal with different licenses for different features really grinds my gears. Just look at Microsoft and O365. If you have ever had to deal with this, you will know what I am talking about.

So what does the simplification look like?

VUL01

Notice that the license edition has gone. All VUL licenses (apart from starter edition) are Enterprise Plus feature parity. The consumption figures are now just 1 for every workload. It should be a lot easier to calculate license requirements now!

Bumping everyone up to Enterprise Plus is going to have its benefits as well. Having the ability to have unlimited repositories in a Veeam scale-out backup repository is one such advantage that comes to mind as well as storage integration in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Below are the products that VUL will work with now. I hope this will expand in the future to include new products and the ones underĀ Not yet on VULĀ section.

VUL02

Wrap it up

I think this is a good move by Veeam. If VIL was dipping the toe in the water, VUL is diving in and going for a swim.

In an ever-increasing shift by business to an Opex consumption of IT services, Veeam Universal Licensing plays right into this. Yes, a socket-based perpetual license may work out cheaper over a 3-year term, but like most monthly commit licenses, they are more feature-rich and allow you to consume new services as and when they become available.

Ian

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