Scenarios

An instance is considered to be protected if it has a restore point (backup or snapshot) created by a backup policy during the past 31 days. The number of license units that a protected instance consumes depends on the instance type and product edition. For more information, see Veeam Licensing Policy.

Note

If an instance has only snapshots created manually, it does not consume any license units. To learn how to create cloud-native snapshots of VM, Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner instances manually, see Performing VM Backup, Performing SQL Backup and Performing Spanner Backup.

When you add a backup appliance to the backup infrastructure, the following scenarios are applied:

If you connect to an existing backup appliance, the BYOL license installed on the appliance becomes invalid. Protected instances start consuming license units from the license installed on the backup server only after the backup policy sessions run on the connected appliance.

When you remove the appliance from the backup infrastructure, Veeam Backup & Replication stops counting backed-up instances. Veeam Backup for Google Cloud continues using the license that had been used before you added the appliance to the backup infrastructure.

If you deploy a new backup appliance from the Veeam Backup & Replication console, instances start consuming license units from the license installed on the backup server after you create and run backup policies.

When you remove the appliance from the backup infrastructure, Veeam Backup & Replication stops counting backed-up instances and Veeam Backup for Google Cloud switches to the Free edition that allows you to protect up to 10 instances free of charge. To back up more than 10 instances, you must install a BYOL license on the appliance. To learn how to install a new BYOL license, see Installing and Removing License.

Licensing When Connection to Veeam Backup & Replication is Lost

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud stores information on protected workloads licensed by Veeam Backup & Replication. This information allows you to back up workloads even if the connection between the backup appliance and backup server is lost. However, the following conditions must be met:

The workload must have already been licensed by the backup server.
The workload must be listed as licensed on the backup appliance side. For more information, see Revoking License Units.
The connection must be lost not more than 31 days ago.

Note that the loss of connection with Veeam Backup & Replication does not affect restore processes and creating of snapshots manually.