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Licensing Requirements

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The Veeam Agent management functionality is licensed by the number of instances. Instances are units (or tokens) that you can use to protect your machines (servers and workstations) with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux. The number of instances that you can use depends on the type of license installed in Veeam Backup & Replication:

Per-instance license. If you use a per-instance license in Veeam Backup & Replication, the number of servers and workstations that you can process with Veeam Agents depends on the edition of Veeam Backup & Replication and the number of instances in the license. For more information, see Veeam Licensing Policy.
Per-socket license. If you use an existing perpetual per-socket license that was obtained for an earlier version of Veeam Backup & Replication, the product allows you to use up to 6 instances to process Veeam Agents. If the number of sockets in your license is less than 6, you can use the number of instances that equals the number of sockets in the license. For example, if the number of sockets in the license is 5, you can use 5 instances. If the number of sockets in the license is 7, you can use 6 instances.
Community edition. If you do not install a license in Veeam Backup & Replication, you can use the Community edition of the product. The Community edition of Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to use 10 instances. Functionality available in the Community edition of Veeam Backup & Replication is the same as in the Standard edition of the product.

For more information on Veeam Backup & Replication licensing, see the Licensing section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Upgrade from Earlier Product Versions

After upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4, you must obtain and install on the Veeam backup server a new per-instance license. To ensure a smooth license update procedure, Veeam Backup & Replication offers a 90-day grace period after the product is upgraded. During this period, you can continue processing Veeam Agents with an old Veeam Agent license that was installed in an earlier version of Veeam Backup & Replication.

During the grace period, you can use Veeam Backup & Replication to process the same number of servers and workstations as the number of servers and workstations in the old Veeam Agent license. If you do not install a new per-instance license, after the grace period expires, you will not be able to process Veeam Agents.

After you install a new per-instance license in Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agents connected to the Veeam backup server will start using instances in the license.

Licensing Requirements Tip:

You can restrict license consumption for Veeam Agents, for example, if you want to use Veeam Backup & Replication to process VMs and do not want Veeam Agents to use instances in the license. To do this, in the Instances tab of the License Information window, clear the Allow unlicensed agents to consume instances check box.