Veeam Maintenance Agreement - Stay or Go?

[DavR]

We're currently using Veeam Backup & Replication to do our VM backups, and I can't complain about the product, it's working fairly reliably all told.

 

I have however just received a quote for our maintenance renewal for the year, and it came as a bit of a shock. For a 4 x CPU setup, we're being quoted over £1000 this year, which is up more than 25% on last year! That much on a contract I don't recall us calling on in the last year is starting to look a bit of a luxury at the moment.

 

So that begs the question, can we do without it? As I understand it the software won't stop working if I don't renew, we just don't get access to upgrades, which I can probably live with. My concen is though, will this mean we'll get no support whatsoever when/if something goes wrong?

 

I will pay up if I have to, but a 25% hike in one year does feel like someone is taking the mickey a bit. Not a fan of the maintenance contract service model - either sell me your product outright, or be upfront and say it's an annual fee or it stops working...

 

Opinions sought!

[AlanD]

I (accidentally) stopped paying for Symantec D2D2T support two years ago.. When I discovered I mistake I offered to pay from the back dated date - but Symantec wasn't having any of it and insisted that I bought new licences (only 3 months overdue). I have used it without problems since - and the money I saved has more than paid for renewing the licences (such is the high cost of support). I'm not rushing to do that. Yes - I don't get updates....but continue to do test restores and everything seems fine. I also run Windows Server backups to local USB/SATA drives just to be doubly certain. In honesty - I think Widnows server backup is rather good. I'm not sure whether I really need to keep D2D2T and I could get by in having a larger number of rotation disks for WSB. you get a lot of those disks for £1000 a year!

[Sylv3r]

Off the top of my head I can't remember our renewal cost this year, but we've been using Veeam for around 3 years now and I am sure year on year the support costs have increased for us.

[Cache]

I budget in a 20% price increase for the maintenance agreement for Veeam (asked our supplier roughly what it would likely increase each year before we made the initial purchase). What are you licencing however, as we have Veeam Backup Essentials Plus and I'm sure our renewal wasn't going to be that much. If you are licencing just the main Veeam Backup and Replication and have a maximum of 3 hosts with 2 CPU's in each host then Essentials/Essentials Plus is worth looking at unless you need a specific feature not included.

 

We did also renew for 3 years this year to benefit from a discount which might be worth looking into if you can afford it (academy accounting through prepayments allowed me to spread this across multiple years budgets).

 

I suppose if you are thinking of canceling, did you update Veeam in the last 12 months to the latest version as your maintenance also covers that.

Edited July 24, 2017 by Cache

[ataylor]

Same here just had a renewal quote for just over £1100.

 

I am very happy with veeam but not sure I can Justify this renewal cost.

[localzuk]

Very difficult to say if that's high or not, without the edition of Veeam you're using, and the number of sockets you license.

 

12 month renewal for 8 sockets for us worked out at £1224 (though that also includes some extra to unify the renewal times of our 2 sets of licenses, if it had just been a plain 12 month renewal, it would've been £1026 for 8 sockets). With B&R Standard.

Edited July 25, 2017 by localzuk

[DavR]

Very difficult to say if that's high or not, without the edition of Veeam you're using, and the number of sockets you license.

 

12 month renewal for 8 sockets for us worked out at £1224 (though that also includes some extra to unify the renewal times of our 2 sets of licenses, if it had just been a plain 12 month renewal, it would've been £1026 for 8 sockets). With B&R Standard.

Hmm, looks like we're on an Enterprise license, which seems a little excessive. I'll have to ask my support company why that is (that's another sticking point, it's them that would be picking things up if it went wrong, not me).

 

So we're B&R Enterprise 9 with 4 sockets over 2 hosts. I'm being quoted £255 per socket, I don't think I'm being given a bad deal as such from my licensing supplier, more a case of it being an expensive service full stop!

 

I wonder if downgrading from Enterprise to Standard is possible. That would really reduce my support contract costs!

[localzuk]

Enterprise has a couple of nice features but I couldn't justify the extra cost here.

[DavR]

I budget in a 20% price increase for the maintenance agreement for Veeam (asked our supplier roughly what it would likely increase each year before we made the initial purchase). What are you licencing however, as we have Veeam Backup Essentials Plus and I'm sure our renewal wasn't going to be that much. If you are licencing just the main Veeam Backup and Replication and have a maximum of 3 hosts with 2 CPU's in each host then Essentials/Essentials Plus is worth looking at unless you need a specific feature not included.

 

We did also renew for 3 years this year to benefit from a discount which might be worth looking into if you can afford it (academy accounting through prepayments allowed me to spread this across multiple years budgets).

 

I suppose if you are thinking of canceling, did you update Veeam in the last 12 months to the latest version as your maintenance also covers that.

 

We're up to 9.0 at the moment, although I see 9.5 is available, and I'd certainly go to that and get my money's worth before closing any contract. I think we might have upgraded to 9 from 8 after paying for our last support contract, to get the value, although what actually happened was our backups borked for a few months.

 

Essential sounds like it might be worth looking at also, thanks for the tip.

[DavR]

Enterprise has a couple of nice features but I couldn't justify the extra cost here.

 

Oh, such as? Looking at the Standard v Enterprise comparisons, I didn't see anything we might need. Exchange for us is off site, and I don't need any fancy SQL business, or self service restore.

[localzuk]

Oh, such as? Looking at the Standard v Enterprise comparisons, I didn't see anything we might need. Exchange for us is off site, and I don't need any fancy SQL business, or self service restore.

Item level recovery for Active Directory & SQL Server and 1 click file recovery.

 

That's about it for me in terms of what'd be useful. But not worth nearly doubling the price.

[DavR]

Yeah, all sounds very neat, but before reading the spec sheets I'd never even considered those features existing, let alone run into a situation where I needed them.

 

I will definitely look at downgrading.

[m25man]

In all honesty the Veeam SKU and pricing matrix is more complex than anything Microsoft have ever produced and the push to the cloud makes it even more complex.

The cheapest way to do it is the Backup & Recovery Std 2 Socket Bundle for Education which was at the last check about £560 each and Maintenance around £145 pa each

Maximum number of Sockets per Institution is 6 so sufficient for a 3 node cluster with change out of £1700

 

Enterprise allows granular restore of SQL tables, AD objects and Exchange items to mailbox level directly.

 

Many schools were sold Veeam on the misunderstanding they "needed" the Enterprise options.

The fact is most only ever needed Standard.

 

With most schools having migrated to O365 there is even less reason now to need Enterprise.

 

In the last few years they jacked up pricing aggressively and then Brexit came along and wiped 20% off of the £ v $

 

There is no downgrade option and resellers are under pressure to hit new business targets every quarter so that's not likely to happen.

 

The licence is perpetual so it will continue to operate out of maintenance however apart from the constant nagging in the logs it will keep working but...

 

It only needs a change or patch from Microsoft or a driver change from a server vendor and your Veeam build is a code wreck so without a valid support agreement you could be in big trouble very quickly.

 

Seems like many will find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place come renewal time and unfortunately it seems like pay up or shut up will be the order of the day.

 

Once Veeam start to see renewals falling off a cliff they will no doubt take some action and possibly soften the stance on downgrading.

For those nearing the end of a support contract make sure you have the latest updates installed and working well ahead of expiry.

 

Also look at Altaro as an alternative.

[AlanD]

Looking at these eye watering figures makes me understand why RM now have their own cloud backup solution which they recon is cost effective. No annual charges for WSB...and no licence cost...but yes, you have to buy new disk now and then...and remember to swap them around.

[psumner1992]

Hmm, looks like we're on an Enterprise license, which seems a little excessive. I'll have to ask my support company why that is (that's another sticking point, it's them that would be picking things up if it went wrong, not me).

 

So we're B&R Enterprise 9 with 4 sockets over 2 hosts. I'm being quoted £255 per socket, I don't think I'm being given a bad deal as such from my licensing supplier, more a case of it being an expensive service full stop!

 

I wonder if downgrading from Enterprise to Standard is possible. That would really reduce my support contract costs!

 

We have just downgraded from Enterprise to Standard for this very reason that the maintenance costs were just too high on Enterprise and we were not using any of the Enterprise features.

 

We contacted our supplier and they were able to sort this out for us after a few emails to Veeam.

 

Veeam sent us some paperwork to complete for us to declare we will not use any Enterprise features in the future and they will support us on standard only, this was a letter of destruction.

 

Applied new maintenance license and all worked as normal without having to reinstall.

 

Downgrading to standard bought our renewal down to around £159 per host per annum (2 cpu per host).

 

Finally, we went with the 3 year agreement to guarantee our costs for the next few years and multi year purchases carry a 10% discount.

 

Hope this helps.

[m25man]

We have just downgraded from Enterprise to Standard for this very reason that the maintenance costs were just too high on Enterprise and we were not using any of the Enterprise features.

 

We contacted our supplier and they were able to sort this out for us after a few emails to Veeam.

 

Veeam sent us some paperwork to complete for us to declare we will not use any Enterprise features in the future and they will support us on standard only, this was a letter of destruction.

 

Applied new maintenance license and all worked as normal without having to reinstall.

 

Downgrading to standard bought our renewal down to around £159 per host per annum (2 cpu per host).

 

Finally, we went with the 3 year agreement to guarantee our costs for the next few years and multi year purchases carry a 10% discount.

 

Hope this helps.

 

This is the definitive answer.

If they have finally conceded and allowed a downgrade as it would appear that's great news for many.

[DavR]

In all honesty the Veeam SKU and pricing matrix is more complex than anything Microsoft have ever produced and the push to the cloud makes it even more complex.

The cheapest way to do it is the Backup & Recovery Std 2 Socket Bundle for Education which was at the last check about £560 each and Maintenance around £145 pa each

Maximum number of Sockets per Institution is 6 so sufficient for a 3 node cluster with change out of £1700

 

Enterprise allows granular restore of SQL tables, AD objects and Exchange items to mailbox level directly.

 

Many schools were sold Veeam on the misunderstanding they "needed" the Enterprise options.

The fact is most only ever needed Standard.

 

With most schools having migrated to O365 there is even less reason now to need Enterprise.

 

In the last few years they jacked up pricing aggressively and then Brexit came along and wiped 20% off of the £ v $

 

There is no downgrade option and resellers are under pressure to hit new business targets every quarter so that's not likely to happen.

 

The licence is perpetual so it will continue to operate out of maintenance however apart from the constant nagging in the logs it will keep working but...

 

It only needs a change or patch from Microsoft or a driver change from a server vendor and your Veeam build is a code wreck so without a valid support agreement you could be in big trouble very quickly.

 

Seems like many will find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place come renewal time and unfortunately it seems like pay up or shut up will be the order of the day.

 

Once Veeam start to see renewals falling off a cliff they will no doubt take some action and possibly soften the stance on downgrading.

For those nearing the end of a support contract make sure you have the latest updates installed and working well ahead of expiry.

 

Also look at Altaro as an alternative.

 

Reinforcing all my points there @m25man - the long term costs on this are going up aggressively, and I can't see a time when I'm going to need the granular features. We don't hold any important data in local SQL, my AD is small enough to rebuild from scratch if needs be, and we've never had Exchange on our virtualised environment.

 

Definitely supports my theory that Standard is the more appropriate version for our use. We're a primary running a simple system, An incremental backup with VM and file level restores is really all we need.

[DavR]

We have just downgraded from Enterprise to Standard for this very reason that the maintenance costs were just too high on Enterprise and we were not using any of the Enterprise features.

 

We contacted our supplier and they were able to sort this out for us after a few emails to Veeam.

 

Veeam sent us some paperwork to complete for us to declare we will not use any Enterprise features in the future and they will support us on standard only, this was a letter of destruction.

 

Applied new maintenance license and all worked as normal without having to reinstall.

 

Downgrading to standard bought our renewal down to around £159 per host per annum (2 cpu per host).

 

Finally, we went with the 3 year agreement to guarantee our costs for the next few years and multi year purchases carry a 10% discount.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Brilliant @psumner1992, this looks to be exactly what we want to do, thank you. If it can be done purely through paperwork and a change of the license file, then that's all the better!

 

The price you have of £159 per annum - how many CPUs are you licensing? Going on the maintenance being 1/5 of purchase, I get about £142 per CPU working from the list price of £712 per CPU. Either way it's going to be better than the £255 per CPU we're being quoted for Enterprise.

 

I need to confirm it with my third line team who notionally support our backups, but looks like a no-brainer to go ahead with downgrade.

[psumner1992]

Brilliant @psumner1992, this looks to be exactly what we want to do, thank you. If it can be done purely through paperwork and a change of the license file, then that's all the better!

 

The price you have of £159 per annum - how many CPUs are you licensing? Going on the maintenance being 1/5 of purchase, I get about £142 per CPU working from the list price of £712 per CPU. Either way it's going to be better than the £255 per CPU we're being quoted for Enterprise.

 

I need to confirm it with my third line team who notionally support our backups, but looks like a no-brainer to go ahead with downgrade.

 

We have Veeam Essentials Enterprise (Hyper-V) with 2 sockets licensed, now essentials standard.

[DavR]

We have Veeam Essentials Enterprise (Hyper-V) with 2 sockets licensed, now essentials standard.

 

Interesting... I'm guessing we probably can't downgrade to Essentials, we are on full B&R - again, so many variations of the same product!

[Tefters]

Nope you can't, Veeam essentials was originally released to go hand in hand with VMware essentials

[PotNoodleTech]

I'm paying under a third of that for 4CPU 2 hosts. As above make sure you are not overpaying on your version for features you may not need and also make sure your on the "for education" licence.

[Tefters]

To give you an idea also, i'm running Veeam Backup Essentials Enterprise (yes you read that right, Enterprise!) at non educational pricing (don't believe you can on the essentials bundle) which is 3x 2 socket bundles at 1 year + 3x 4 year maintenance and it came in at £734 per year to cover 3x dual socket servers in a cluster.

If you break that down that's £245 per year per server or £122.50 if you want to be a socket count person.

 

Some things to note here:

 

- I licensed before the end of June as Veeam and their resellers clearly advertised a price increase from July.

- I licensed for 5 years total (Socket bundle with included 1 year + 4 year maintenance) to lock in price and anyone who uses Veeam properly will tell you its a product you are not going to look at moving away from on a technical/ease of use/performance level anytime soon!

- Use a decent reseller, i'm not getting anything out of this but to drop some names: Misco and Insight are two that I use from a pool of around 10 (yes i'm nice and let others quote from blanket emails I send out) and between them they win 100% of the time by at least 2% margin if not more and I go with the rule of first time quote! None of this "OK sorry to hear someone gave you a better quote let me try and adjust our pricing and come back to you" bullsh*t, get it right first time or don't bother (IT sales people need to learn to not be greedy on their margins).

I can even give you contact names and you can tell them I sent you if your curious but you will have to PM me.

 

Even after the price increase I would of expected my per server per year cost to increase to around £300 (rough) and still be acceptable in my eyes.

 

Locking in and planning licensing on a 3 to 5 year term saves you so much money and should not be looked at as a yearly costing.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Tefters

[DavR]

I'm paying under a third of that for 4CPU 2 hosts. As above make sure you are not overpaying on your version for features you may not need and also make sure your on the "for education" licence.

 

We're not on the "for education" license, I'm not sure whether there is a downgrade path to Education or Essentials scheme from our current license? I will pose the question to my licensing supplier.

 

We got our Veeam in 2014 I think, I don't know whether the Education or Essentials programs were available then, or whether the company who installed this system didn't do their homework...

[Tefters]

We're not on the "for education" license, I'm not sure whether there is a downgrade path to Education or Essentials scheme from our current license? I will pose the question to my licensing supplier.

 

We got our Veeam in 2014 I think, I don't know whether the Education or Essentials programs were available then, or whether the company who installed this system didn't do their homework...

Sounds like n*b jockey installers.

 

I've had Veeam for 6 years (since 2011) on the essentials bundle, education pricing I believe didn't come to fruition til around 2014/15.

 

EDIT - Dave, how many servers/sockets we talking here for you to cover? and what version of Hypervisor and Veeam are you currently on?

Edited July 28, 2017 by Tefters