If you are reading this, you probably tried to renew your NFR license with Veeam and as me you haven’t really followed what Veeam has done regarding licensing. Doing it the old way, you searched for NFR license key for Veeam Backup & Replication, and then ended up to the same old form where you say you are a VMware VCP/VCAP etc certified. And then you get the email below;
Hi Antti,
Thanks for your request for a license key of Veeam Data Platform.
Our records indicate that you have already received a NFR license.
I went ahead and sent an email to Veeam sales, who probably got a ton on emails from people like me to renew the NFR key. Haven’t heard back from them yet but would assume that they won’t give a new key.
Veeam Community license
I went ahead and sent an email to Veeam sales, who probably got a ton on emails from people like me to renew the NFR key. Haven’t heard back from them yet but would assume that they won’t give a new key.
As discussed in the Veeam community (here), the Veeam community edition is the way to go in the future. So how to you convert your old NFR installation to the community edition you ask? Well you just delete your NFR license key, assuming you have a new enough Veeam Backup & Replication installation. Not intuitive, thus this blog post.
Couldn’t find any information about the community license key so decided to just try to remove my key, and that was it. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
As you can see from my NFR key, it was for 20 instances while the community license is for 10 instances 😔The good thing is, VMware vCenter server/ESXi server or a Proxmox host would count as one instance which is plenty for my homelab use.
And if you are new to Veeam software, you can get the community edition from here Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition Download.
What won’t work?
A comprehensive list can be found at veeam_data_platform_feature_comparison_ds.pdf.
Here is a list of issues when downgrading from NFR to Community license, my personal list at least;
Error: File versions archiving capability is not included in this product edition. Please disable file versions archiving and restart the job.
I used to backup my most important files from the NAS to local Veeam B&R repository, and then archive the stuff offsite in case of catastrophic failure at home (Like water or fire damage). Well no more…. the good this is you can modify the existing job and detach the archiving functionality and keep the old backup chain locally. The bad thing, well object storage is also behind Enterprise licensing.
What I ended up doing was create a Cloud Sync Task with Truenas (More here), and set the object retention time to keep versions for 31 days. Close enough for my needs, and Back Blaze provides cheap enough object storage in the EU for my needs.
