Hi @jps666 

You use licenses to backup, if there is no active backup config then there is no license usage.

What I would like to say upfront, I do not support the potential incorrect usage of the licensing calculation.

But to answer your question, yes you can perform repeated backups like that and secondly Commvault can see it if you have metering uploads to the cloud, then your Commvault account manager can expect a call to discuss additional licensing.

Hi Jos

You're right. I also think this might be potential illegal license use.

To clarify let me say that I do not accept the illegal use of any software.

The fact that subclients with disabled activity but with valid backups are not counted in the capacity license is a big surprise to me. Are there any specific reasons why this is so ?

I also would like to know if and what are the (especially negative) consequences of acitivity disabling and again enabling for subclients. Now we find out that can cause an effect in reporting on the available license.

Is there any posibility that backups from disabled subclients would be somehow blocked by commvault by means of possible incorrect licence use ?

This might be a real problem. For example, one of my clients likes to disable acitivity for some subclients to turn off its backup quickly but temporarily without sheduler policy to be (annoying) reconfigured.

Regards

Hi All,

I think I can help here… the Licensing Definition is indeed to count only the capacity from the active subclients.  This is by design, and the reason we don’t count inactive subclients is because of some specific use cases where customers do a one-time ingestion of data (be it old backup data from another platform, or simply a one time capture of a static data set), and never plan to actively back it up ever again.  It would simply be too cost prohibitive to charge regular backup prices for those types of use cases, so we keep it excluded from the licensing totals, and it becomes an ancillary benefit of the licensing you have purchased.  We focus the metering on the data you’re going to backup on a regular/recurring basis… 

Now with that said, and as others have called out here… using that functionality to conceal actual intent would be a violation of the licensing terms.  If you’ve legitimately suspended backup jobs and deactivated a client or subclient for a stale data set going forward, that’s valid.  If you turn off certain subclients with the intent to turn them on again, and play musical chairs with your active subclients to stay under your license entitlement… a) that’s incredibly tedious to do, and b) it’s violating the spirit of the licensing terms, which say that subclients with active/recurring backups are to be licensed.  The minute you turn that subclient back on, the last full goes back into the totals.

As also mentioned, we do have the ability to track and measure against the PEAK backup total in a given month, regardless of active/inactive status, so we do keep a close eye on it (and that reporting is also available in the local commcell reporting as well), however the maneuvering we’re talking about here is not a practice that we see people engage in very often, thankfully.  If that were to change, we’d have to reconsider the benefit.  But on the whole, folks do tend to work in good faith with the spirit and terms of the licensing.

So ultimately, the intent/spirit of the licensing is absolutely to count the data sets that you are going to be backing up on an ongoing basis.  Using the software configuration options to hide how much data you’re actively backing up would not absolve you from the license requirement.

Hope that helps a bit.

-- Jeremy A.