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This won’t hurt a bit, says Veeam, as it flags end of socket-based licensing

Change to universal licenses coming sometime in 2022, says backup vendor, but won't be forced

Backup vendor Veeam is almost certainly going to ditch per-socket licensing.

Senior veep for product management Anton Gostev has floated the idea for months in user forums, but last week revealed that the change is now all-but a fait accompli.

"All in all, it is looking like Veeam will in the end go ahead and stop selling Socket-based licenses sometime next year, just as I expected."

As recently reported on our sibling site Blocks and Files, previous speculation about the change has not been well-received by Veeam customers.

Gostev's post therefore tries to quell discontent, stating that existing socket-based licenses will remain valid, and owners can renew them – even for "future product versions".

Nor will customers be forced to migrate. "The upgrades to VUL will be driven using [a] 'carrot' (incentives) versus 'stick' (end of life) approach," he wrote.

The vendor's preferred "Veeam Universal License" (VUL) will be sold as both a subscription and a perpetual license, "because in some markets customers only have the option to purchase on perpetual contracts".

Veeam already offers the VUL – a per-workload license that can be applied on-prem or in the cloud, for apps or servers, and is portable.

Gostev suggests the VUL reflects how IT runs these days, and that socket-based licenses "cannot be used for the majority of workloads Veeam can protect these days".

"Since I like analogies: there's no point to keep selling gas that allows cars to drive on certain types of roads only," his post explains.

He may have a point: cloudy workloads are not tied to the concept of server sockets, and a great many organisations now operate in hybrid clouds. Veeam may therefore escape the kind of user anger that followed, for example, VMware's inflationary decision to tweak licensing on terms that meant prices rise with CPU core counts, rather than the number of physical CPUs present in a machine.

That change was made in response to hardware vendors, especially Lenovo, pointing out that a single-socket server with a 64-core AMD EPYC CPU could run an awful lot of virtual machines at lower license fees than a machine with a pair of 32-core CPUs. ®

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