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Traditional Licensing behavior inquiry
Hello everyone!
I have a question about the behavior of Traditional Licensing in NetWorker, which I would like to know about your experience in the matter.
We have a NetWorker environment that has a very long and very old history. It was currently migrated to a RHEL virtual server and also runs on version 19.2.1.4. The biggest point of attention is that my customer has not changed the type of licensing to one by Capacity.
This obviously given the size of the platform, has caused us to no longer have licenses available, but I need to be able to query the following:
If a client is no longer active in NW, but they have current backups (due to retention), are they still consuming licenses?
We have an ongoing case with Support, but it's been almost 200 days and we haven't been able to provide a solution (even escalating with the SME), they provided me with a list which informs "all clients with active License Enabler", of which Indeed, half of the clients are valid with scheduled backups, and the other half are clients that are not active in the backup regime but have current backups due to retention.
My customer tells me that this is not the expected behavior and that by "removing the client from the NMC console" and/or "de-scheduling" from the console, the license in use should be released, even with current backups due to retention.
I am not really sure about that assertion.
Therefore, I write this problem here to know your experience in the case, and to be able to answer what was stated above:
- Even if the client is removed from the NMC or removed from "scheduling", if it has current backups due to retention, does it continue to consume licenses? o Should NW release the license?
I really appreciate your help, since I don't know if the behavior of Traditional Licencing is like that, or if my NW environment is corrupted.
PS: my customer does not want to change the licensing type to one by Capacity...
DiegoRZen
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November 14th, 2022 13:00
Good afternoon everyone!
Finally we check that backups or SSIDs as such do not consume a license per se. What consumes the license is the client or resource created in the NetWorker console.
After deleting 80 inactive clients (but which have valid backups stored for retention), the licenses were released:
Previously, we had only removed inactive clients but no current backups in storage.
bingo.1
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November 7th, 2022 13:00
"If a client is no longer active in NW, but they have current backups (due to retention), are they still consuming licenses?" - AFAIR yes, as longs as there exist a valid save set in the indexes.
You should be able to run nsrlic and verify the output.
A client still uses a license if its name still appears in the list of 'connected clients'.
barry_beckers
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November 8th, 2022 02:00
There's also a difference between expected behavior and actual behavior, as I can recall NW doing peculiar things wrg to licenses and the release of assigned licenses. Things like switching depending on a NW module backup being run.
I at the time was very glad we were allowed to use a NW enterprise enabler, which in effect simply disables licensing altogether as we couldn't keep up with adding new licenses and the way the licensing was setup up at the time wrg to purchasing them (I am even talking about them Legato days, before EMC and later Dell took over). Ran in way too many issue over the course of time, moving licenses back and forth between environments, even causing NW backup servers to become disabled as it saw on the network another backup server was using the same (temporary) license...
But nowadays with them capacity licenses (especially from nw9.2 or so onwards with the Unserved license, not needing a license server running), things are also simplified, as when you are going beyond the capacity of the licensed enabler, it simply keeps on working. This as actual costs for the used capacity is arranged differently when using Dell DPS licensing, as we have to show monthly "front end protected capacity" figures (either through DPA or output of nsrcapinfo, which is (or should be) similar), showing the largest backup of the last 60 days of all involved clients. So billing is based on that.
DiegoRZen
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November 10th, 2022 10:00
bingo.1, barry_beckers:
The nsrlic command gives me the same scan results that we did with Support, which tells me that we don't have client licenses available.
Thank you very much for your answers and your experience. This week I have a meet with the support and the SME and we will see what the answer is that they will give us, which I will share in this Topic.
It's a very strange case that seems to have no solution.
I think I have to convince my customer to change the license type to Capacity...
bingo.1
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November 14th, 2022 15:00
Good point ... which we obviously just forgot. Why? - because it does not make sense to keep clients configured if you do not want to access their backups any longer.
However, if you later discover that you need this client for a recovery, you can still recreate its resource.