Reducing License Usage

Delayed License Consumption for New Workloads and Users

For all Veeam products with VCSP Rental license installed, the License Information screen will mark workloads processed for the first time within the current calendar month as New Instances. For example, if you added and backed up a VM on February 15, 2022, this machine will be tagged as a New Instance for your February usage (reported and billed in March).

To offer service providers more flexibility when offering trial periods for processing new machines, these new workloads will not consume a license. Furthermore, you do not need to report license usage of new workloads in that month. For more information, see the Veeam Cloud Connect Administrator Guide article (this offering is not specific to Veeam Cloud Connect).

The same logic applies to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 users. When users are backed up for the first time, they will be shown as New Users. For more information, see this Help Center article.

For Veeam ONE, objects monitored for the first time will be shown as New Objects. For more information, see this Help Center article.

Workloads Without Active Restore Points

By default, Veeam products measure usage within a given payment period based on the latest restore point. If a given workload does not have at least one restore point created by Veeam within the last 31 days, this workload will not consume a rental license for that month. For more details, see Veeam Licensing Policy.

For example, if you backed up a VM every day from January 1, 2024 through March 15th, 2024 but stopped backing up that workload, it will stop showing up on your monthly rental usage reports beginning the first of May (representing your April usage month).

Note

For Veeam Agents managed in Veeam Service Provider Console, license consumption is based on the activation date instead of the restore point creation date. After activation, workloads will be marked as new instances and will not consume a rental license for the first month. For more information, see the Activating Veeam Backup Agents section in the Guide for Service Providers.

If you stopped backing up a workload and want to reduce the license usage, you need to switch Veeam Agents to the unmanaged mode. For more information, see the Switching Veeam Backup Agents to Unmanaged Mode section in the Guide for Service Providers.

Using Veeam Cloud Connect Backup as a Service

Veeam Cloud Connect backup can be distributed for free to service providers offering end-to-end Backup as a Service. This license scenario is allowed in two cases:

If you are an MSP offering your tenants a fully managed services for Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac.
If you provide Cloud Connect Backup infrastructure to your channel partners (resellers) who offer remote managed services for Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agents to tenants. This can be combined with Veeam Service Provider Console Reseller role to "white-label" the service.

To use this license scenario, generate and install a VCSP Rental license file on your tenant backup server.

Note

For Veeam Cloud Connect Replication and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with Veeam Cloud Connect, the license is consumed from both the tenant and the service provider regardless of the license type installed on the tenant Veeam Backup & Replication server.

For more information about this licensing model, especially how it relates to tenant tracking and backwards compatibility versions, see this Veeam Cloud Connect Administrator Guide article.