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 [1]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."

[2]

As [3]recently reported on our sibling site Blocks and Files , previous speculation about the change has not been well-received by Veeam customers.

[4]

[5]

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.

[6]

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".

[7]

"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.

[8]Back up a minute: Private equity outfit coughs $5bn for Veeam

[9]'This repository is private' – so what's it doing on the public internet, GE Aviation?

[10]The eyeopening multi-billion-dollar merry-go-round of Insight Partners, Veeam – and their one-time beau N2WS

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, [11]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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[1] https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/phasing-out-our-socket-based-licensing-t74168-60.html#p429213

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YVGWaS@6JdVNWur3xNAizAAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/09/13/socket-to-me-veeam-instance-license-confusion/

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YVGWaS@6JdVNWur3xNAizAAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/09/insight_partners_gobbles_veeam_for_5bn/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/09/ge_aviation_jenkins_dns_snafu/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/15/veeam_n2ws_insight_partners/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/04/vmware/

[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/