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Agent license

Shahin
Level 6

Hi,

We want to upgrade our BE 16 to BE 20.5, we already have our own licenses voor BE 15 agents. I know we have to get a new license for the BE 20 itself, but can we use our current BE 15 Agent licenses? or we have to buy also BE 20 Agent licenses? 

14 REPLIES 14

Gurvinder
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

You can check the licensing guide to see how many licenses you will need to protect current infrastructure with BE 20 or 21. The agents are installed on remote server but the license for them are applied on BE server and BE 15 agent licenses are not compatible to be put on BE 20 or 21 BE server. Check https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100032497? for more details.

ParagKavitke
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

Hello,

The licenses for Backup Exec are to be installed on the BE servers only, the servers being protected only runs the BE agents. Depending upon the type of BE20 licenses you procure, you get the Agents support implicitly. There are no seperate licenses that needs to be installed on Agent servers.

Just for information, Backup Exec has released BE21 version recently. 

What's new in BE 21

Backup Exec 21 Licensing Guide

 

Thanks,
Parag Kavitke

Thanks for your reply,

I understand the licenses should be installed only on the BE server. Our BE 15 licenses are for On-premis, currntly we have 5 windows server licenses and 2 Hyper-v licenses for our BE 15

So if I understood you correlty when we upgrade from BE 15 to BE 20 or 21 we must have one license for BE 20 also have 5 Windows servers and 2 Hyper-v licenses for BE20 or 21, correct?

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@Shahin 

Have you been paying annual maintenance on your licenses?

If so, you can upgrade for free. 

If maintenance is not up to date, you have 2 choices: 
1.  Get a quote from your local reseller for all outstanding maintenance,
2.  ask for a quote for new licenses. 

You will need new licenses for all options and agents that you are using. You cannot mix old and new licenses.

Using version 20.x or 21 server software with version 15 agents is not supported. 
Server and agent software version need to be the same. 

If you need to purchase all new licenses, be sure to speak to your local reseller about instance-based licensing. 
IMHO, this is the best licensing method at the moment. 

Thank you for your reply,

I checked our current licenses and see no end date.

I will contact the reseller and see what options are available for upgrading from 15 to 20.

Thanks

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@Shahin 

Bear in mind that there is a difference between licenses and maintenance.

When you purchase perpetual license with 1 year maintenance, the licenses remain valid forever (perpetual), but you only have maintenance for 1 year. 

In that 1 year, the maintenance gives you access to Veritas Support, to patches, hotfixes and new versions of software.

If you do not renew maintenance, you can still continue to use the software that you purchased (forever), but you lose access to everything that maintenance gives you. 

If you logon to the VEMS (licensing) portal, you can see maintenance expiration dates. 

Please see attached example -
The customer sent me a screenshot of their VEMS portal, asking me why they do not have access to BE 20.6.

You can see that Entitlement Status shows 'Active'.
That is because they purchased Perpetual license. So, they can continue to use any version up to 20.1. (Forvever.)
Their BE maintenance expired in 2018, making 'Service Status' a red X. 
This means that because their maintenance was not renewed, they do not have access to 20.6 or 21. 

They now have 2 choices - pay maintenance backdated to 2018, or else purchase new licenses. 
They will need to renew all licenses or purchase all new licenses.
It is not supported to use new BE Server license with previous version agent licenses. 

Hope this explanation helps? 

Hi Marinne,

So if we have Backup exec 16 Perpetual licenses and we have support untill 2021, We can go ahed and upgrade our BE 16 to BE 20.6 and also upgrade our current agents to 20.6 without any extra costs?

Thanks

PJ_Backup
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

Correct - but you will need to go onto the VEMS portal and download the 20.6 or 21 licenses first (at no cost) as you will import these license details during the upgrade or install.

I would refer to this TN for details on this process:

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100044376 - Steps to download the Backup Exec Licenses and Installation Files within VEMS

which incidentally is the first link in the article of licensing links that Gurvinder posted right at the start of this thread above (https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100032497 - Backup Exec Licensing Links)

Although this can be a confusing process, I believe it has improved in recent years, and also the step-by-step technote makes it relatively straight forward to follow.

Hi PJ,

Thanks as always for you help,

Last year we bought are BE 20 licenses from a resealler and we got an Email from Varitas with a pdf document that has our Entitlement ID.

Now when go to the www.veritas.com/support and sign in to ur account and go to the License tab, we see no licenes there or when go to the Entitlement  tab get this error :ERROR : Authentication failed

Any suggestions? our support is active for 3 month more.

PJ_Backup
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

In that case I believe your best bet is to contact Veritas Customer Care by phone - the correct contact number to use for your country can be found here:

https://www.veritas.com/company/contact - Worldwide Contact Information

Sorry I can't be more help but this is now outside the scope of "technical" support, hope this makes sense.

Good luck..!

 

Thank you PJ,

I will contace the Veritas Customer Care for the error that we see in the portal.

Just one more question,

Should we add our Entitlement ID that we see in the the email we have recieved from Veritas to the Portal? Or it should be visible there?

 

Thanks

PJ_Backup
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

From my understanding the entitlement should already be there, however this is something customer care would be best suited to answer - possibly they will need to asociate it with your email/account.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

I agree with @PJ_Backup . 
Chances are 99.9% that the issue is with the email account that you are using to logon.
I must be the same address that appears on Veritas's licensing system.

@Shahin 
Can you double-check the email address that Veritas used to send license entitlement to? 

Hi Marianne,

Thanks as alwys for your reply,

I did check the email, and I can see that we get the email from resealler with an PDF file that conatin our licenses, I did login we the email address that resealler send the licenses to.This is the account that in past we used for backup exec

veritas.JPG