What to make of my licensing situation?

[Hanny]

Can anyone help me make sense of my licensing situation? I recently lost our IT partner who provided my Backup Exec and the know how behind it. Just looking to upgrade to 2012 to get at the ehanced backup to disk options to mitigate tapes getting full!

We bought Backup Exec 2010 OEM with 12 months support and an additional agent to cover A Small Business Server 2008 Premium environment. The support has now expired but whilst it was running I got the 2012 upgrade license keys but never deployed it. Considering renewing the support on it but need to get a budget approved first.

Current environment is as follows:

• 1 x Small Business Server 2008 running SharePoint, Exchange 2007, Active Directory & 2 x SQL Server Express instances for Backup Exec and an anti-virus product.
• 1 x Windows 2008 with SQL Server 2008 (as provided by SBS 2008 Premium License).
• 1 x Windows Server 2008 R2 web edition running 1 SQL Express 2008 R2 instance (this is not currently covered by a backup exec agent).

My questions are:

1. Even though the support contract has run out am I still elegible to install the 2012 edition?
2. The license assesment tool acknowledges that we have Backup Exec 2010 Small Business plus an agent. For some reason it says we are not in compliance because we need licenses for SharePoint, Exchange and 2 x SQL server licenses. This cannot be corrrect. Is this a concern?
3. We originally bought Backup Exec 2010 OEM + 1 agent license. In my licensing portal I have an entry for Backup Exec Small Business Edition 2012 plus two agents. Does this mean I can now cover my third server?

Sorry if these questions are a little straightforwardly obvious. I have to deal with my company's IT all on my own so any opportunity to "bounce off" someone else to make things clearer is much appreciated.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

As long as you have the correct licence key, you can upgrade to BE 2012.

The BE 2012 SBE only comes with 1 SQL Server licence, so you can backup your SQL Server in the second machine.  There is no need to backup the BEDB because BE does its own backup.  That leaves your AV.  If it requires backup, then you would need to buy a full version of BE because you cannot add a second SQL licence to the BE 2012 SBE.

All the other applications like Exchange are covered by the SBE licence.

You would need to check that you have the licence keys for the SBE edition and 2 x RAWS.  Otherwise, you need to buy 2 x RAWS licences to cover the other servers.

If you want to be 100% certain, check with the Symantec Licencing department which is the final authority on licencing matters.

[Hanny]

Hi Pkh and thank you for your resonse.

I will review the selection of SQL servers. As for the licenses it appears I have one license for BE 2012 SBE and 2 agents so I could possibly look at covering the third server.

Again, thank you for your input. Most helpful.

[pkh]

BE 2012 SBE only allows you to input 2 remote agent licences, no more