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Releasing license vs retiring client

  • 1 May 2023
  • 1 reply
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I am hoping someone can provide clarification on the difference between releasing a client’s license and retiring that client. We have clients with backup data we wish to retain until it ages out, but the client does not need to be backed up.

As I understand it, releasing the license means backups will no longer take place but backup data will remain intact. Retiring the client seems to also do this. Is the primary difference that a client can have its license re-allocated, whereas a retired client must be recreated as a new client? If this is the case, what’s the use case for retiring a client completely?

Many thanks for reading and any input!

@justin000 

Good question. The key difference is basically a workflow... Retiring a client will automatically release the license, deconfigure the agent/client and delete the client (unless it has valid data within retention). Once the client is deleted, it’s gone. 

If you wanted to completely decommission and remove a client in your environment that is no longer required, before we introduced this capability, all the above steps would be manual. 
 

As for ‘releasing a license’, this does just as it says… it drops the application license for the component you are releasing it against (some clients can consume multiple licenses). For example, some people may want to do one backup every 6 months of a file server for long term retention, so once done, they’d release the license to free it until another manual job is needed. 

In both instances (retiring / releasing), you get a license back to re-use elsewhere.

Hopefully that makes sense.

 

Regards,
Chris

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