Our Veeam renewal (smb) has gone up 558%? Am I having a stroke or something?
Posted by bingblangblong@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 135 comments
Paid £875.60 for 3 years of B&R Essentials, 2 sockets in 2023. Latest quote for renewal is £1920 for one year, 20 VMs.
I see several posts discussing Veeam's new licensing model but wow. Going to see if our current incumbent can renew the existing socket based perpetual license.
I like Veeam a lot, so I don't want to switch, but if there are equally good alternatives I may have to.
Rickatron@reddit
Sorry I'm late here but u/bingblangblong -> I have to think something is amiss in how this was quoted.
The one mystery is if the renewal lapsed? Why I ask is socket customers can migrate to VUL at the price of their maintenance renewal. This is not new and should be well known. Fruther, existing socket customers can renew their sockets. But, Essentials cannot buy more,
I hope these points help clarify. You can reach out to me rick.vanover@veeam.com for more. some may look and say "this is a small customer" but that doesn't matter, it should be right.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Veeam is doing a Broadcom move. Well, they were born as a Vmware backup solution, so maybe they think they can pull a Broadcom trick and make a lot of money. Like "if people still uses Vmware, why should they stop using Veeam?"
Not from me for sure. I use Proxmox VE and Proxmox backup.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
We're going to look to move to Proxmox VE too. It should be perfect for a small business like ours. I've been running it at home for over a decade.
Do you use m365? Just wondering what we should look into for backing that up if Veeam's new licensing affects that too.
wbrd@reddit
Ups works fine. I haven't sysadminned since Sun was a big player and I had 0 trouble spinning up a box. My only issue was using a consumer grade SSD (that worked fine for a gaming rig) without a heat sink. The error messages aren't the best when it's crashing but I guess they can't take every idiot into account when doing error checking.
Everything I do at work (as a data dev) is on GCP and Azure and honestly I wouldn't put anything on prem if I could help it. It's super easy to just shove everything in terraform and track it in GitHub.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
I can't see us moving entirely to the cloud. We're an engineering company, everyone needs to plug things into their PCs (the things we design and make) we need low latency to store all our lab data logging on a local server. I've built software that's heavily used now that dives into our Sage SQL backend and pulls out bills of materials, stock information etc. Putting that on the cloud would just make it slower and more fragile.
A year ago a backhoe went through the fiber lines. We kept working just fine.
Maybe I am just being a luddite, but I will always favour the data sovereignty and control you get with your own server, and, as you probably guessed, I just like it. I like putting servers in the rack, I like working with my hands to a degree. It just feels... right?
There's no amount of "terraform apply" that'll replicate walking into a server room and hearing the fans and the disks whirring and the cables flowing. I love that shit.
I also must quote the GTA 5 parody of the cloud:
"Imagine a computer you share with everyone, imagine your private data spread, around the world. Nothing could possibly go wrong."
Accomplished_Sir_660@reddit
The cloud not yo friend.
tigglysticks@reddit
100%
It blows my mind that people don't get this. The cloud is slow and fragile. Maybe it works for sales guys but "real" work is best done on prem.
wbrd@reddit
I don't know. I do a bunch of big data stuff and to match the speed of the queries I would need millions of dollars of machines and drives, and people to manage them. And they'd sit idle most of the day. If the analysts want to run some huge llm or whatever they can spin up a machine with an obscene amount of ram and graphics cards, do their thing, and then turn it off and it's like $10 a run where it would be a $30k+ machine to do the same thing.
tigglysticks@reddit
Right, but that's not 24/7 business work like I and the OP are talking about.
Stick a cloud workflow in a critical business path and you'll find out just how fragile it is real quick.
wbrd@reddit
Hundreds of airflow jobs, thousands of dbt transforms, billions of dollars in revenue, dozen of offices around the world. On prem for one group means effectively cloud for everyone else, and the spikey nature of the loads don't make sense for on prem. Maybe a small shop makes sense, but a large operation whose primary business isn't IT is going to do better with a provider.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Or maybe have your own servers in some DC. Remote, but owned resources.
tigglysticks@reddit
This works too if there is a need for it.
wbrd@reddit
I've done that for PCI stuff where the environment was the difficult bit.
tigglysticks@reddit
I'm not talking IT. I'm talking manufacturing, content creation, engineering where datasets are being worked on in real time non stop.
Businesses that run and depend on their software workflows.
With the one exception of if you're really only needing to use the resources <10% of the time, cloud will always be more expensive. This is why many companies are moving back to on prem. You still need IT staff, you still need licensing, networking, etc. All you do moving to the cloud is sticking another company in your critical workflow that doesn't give a shit about your critical workflow.
Every company I consult with complains to me about shit performance after they moved to cloud infrastructure and all the random downtime that you now have zero control over. And all I can tell them is I told you so.
wbrd@reddit
Manufacturing sure because scada shouldn't be on the Internet anyway, but the rest work fine in the cloud. I don't know why they complain about performance unless they haven't designed their workflows properly. As far as random downtime, it's exceedingly rare. Other than the couple of world outages by aws and azure, I can't think of any downtime that was the fault of the cloud provider.
Honestly you sound like a salesperson for on prem, but I've done both since the 90s and I wouldn't bother with on prem in most cases. I've written software for a big project and then had to wait months to get enough machines racked to handle the new load. Now, if I want double my entire infrastructure I could have it spun up in less than an hour.
tigglysticks@reddit
400us is 100x faster than 40ms.
simple.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
And this is the real use case for the real cloud (that means immediately and immensely scalable systems you pay by the minute or by the second). Which is not what the current "cloud" usually is. The current "cloud" is just storage or some SaaS you pay for every year.
uzlonewolf@reddit
I mean, it's going to completely depend on what you're doing. Cloud and on-prem are both tools, and you should use the appropriate tool for the job at hand.
tigglysticks@reddit
That's exactly my point.
I'm just more bitter.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Yes. I may be old but I'm for everything on prem, everything open source. Then I know that it's not always possible, but I always push for this.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Yeah. We went with FOG, Zabbix, Graylog etc. Debian everywhere where possible. We HAVE to use Windows for Office files and CAD stuff, and anything other than AD doesn't make sense for that, but wherever possible it's all Linux.
All these cloud services change constantly, they come and go, are acquired, gutted, bled out, I hate being at their mercy. It's all proprietary tech too, you'll learn their ecosystem then it just changes one day and now you have to learn something else. The stuff I learned as a 12 year old screwing around with Knoppix is still relevant.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
I'm old, but I am for everything on prem. On prem we make the rules, we evaluate the risks, we keep control of expenses. Much better with open source software, which has a much slower enshittification rate than commercial one. (actually there are very rare cases of good commercial software still in existence)
*REAL* cloud solutions are good for specific use cases, like if you have a web site that has one million visits 4 days every month and then very low traffic for the remaining ones.
Using everything as a service is not cost effective, is subject to a hard lock-in, and your data is in the hands of the service provider. Very bad.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
I've been using Proxmox in prod since version 4. It works really well. Not *perfect* but good. The worst part has been ZFS issues, where ZFS (paired with poor default choices from Proxmox) could eat up all the ram and reboot the node. The old and tried LVM over hardware RAID has been working fine since forever. I reckon ZFS has its advantages like storage replication. In modern versions it seems to work much better, but you need to understand its workings to tame it.
My classic setup is with a small cluster (3 hosts) or even single hosts. I work for small (super-small) businesses, too.
Proxmox backup is really good, too. I still don't trust it completely (I'm paranoid) so I also keep some "classic" proxmox backups. (full images taken with the original proxmox backup system inside the proxmox host itself)
You will not miss vsphere since every proxmox host has a web UI and in a cluster every host (if not broken) will show you (and manage) the whole cluster. I have never liked the idea that you need a VM to manage a cluster. It feels wrong to me.
I don't use m365 (I'm a linux sysadmin) but I have one customer that uses it. For that, I found that a quite cheap Synology NAS (I believe every model that does not have a "J" in its model name) comes with a free backup software that can backup both windows workstations (like Veeam Agent for Windows) and m365 account contents. I have set it up for both uses. I save mailboxes from m365, but it can save also other kind of data.
The software is called "active backup for microsoft 365" (and "active backup for business" for Windows PCs)
Soluchyte@reddit
Also on the vsphere thing, proxmox offers Proxmox Datacentre Manager.
Lynch31337@reddit
PegaProx is pretty awesome too.
Soluchyte@reddit
No thank you, no vibe coded stuff please. The same applies for wolfstack and the 10 other 100% vibe coded panels, all huge security holes, they do not belong.
Lynch31337@reddit
Is this what you consider vibe coding? (Honest question, not snarky)
“Like most modern dev teams, we use AI-assisted tooling (code completion, docs generation, review automation, security audits). All architecture decisions, implementation, and testing are handled by our three-person team.”
Soluchyte@reddit
I don't want any AI code anywhere near my production environments, at all, ever. I don't trust 99% of LLM users to be telling the truth about them reading and checking the AI code to ensure it's actually any good. There's been enough stories already of people gettting their entire production environments blown up or data getting leaked, among other things.
One of the only people I do trust to actually read the code that AI produces is linus torvalds, who has admitted to using AI. Because I know he is militant about code quality in general.
This is before all the moral issues of AI code basically being generated by corporations that stole millions of years worth of human's free work without any consent, to use to train an AI to profit from. Or of course how AI has decimated the hardware market and now I'm needing to spend 4x as much to buy the same stuff as before.
iB83gbRo@reddit
You don't run Windows?
Kurgan_IT@reddit
I do my best to avoid it. But anyway our battle against slop code is lost, even in Linux there is more and more slop code. Mostly from the people who have destroyed Linux with all of the new crap.
Soluchyte@reddit
The battle will be easier when AI companies are not trying to shove the LLMs in our face, they are making a loss just to try to get us reliant on it, so they can later jack up the price and then start making money.
Uber did it, Amazon did it, Netflix did it, and many others too.
When the price adjustments happen during the innevitable AI crash, so many people will stop using it.
Soluchyte@reddit
The only windows I run is W10 LTSC, otherwise all Linux now.
Lynch31337@reddit
Well stated, thanks!
Reverent@reddit
Irrespective of vibe coding, if there’s one location to be wary of extra tools, it’s your hypervisor. The risk is too high to just be trying flavour of the month apps to manage it.
BCIT_Richard@reddit
I agree, Wolfstack sounds awesome, but once you get it installed you realize it's another Huntarr situation, jack of all, master of none.
Soluchyte@reddit
I pretty much try to avoid anything with a claude.md in the repo. Asahi Linux says it all so very well. https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
wbrd@reddit
Do you just let proxmox handle shutdown if you have a power outage or do you run things on the nodes as well?
Kurgan_IT@reddit
I let proxmox handle it. When the host gets a shutdown command (from the UPS or even from command line like a simple "poweroff" in shell) it sends shutdown commands to the VMs (via ACPI or via agent) and waits for them to be shut down before shutting down itself.
Maybe if there are complications, like some VM that needs 5 minutes to shut down itself, then I should actually need to install apcupsd or NUT inside that vm too, make it talk to the master on the network and set policies so the "complex" vm starts shutting down itself when the battery is not fully depleted so it has time. I did not need to do it, but if there is some complex scenario it's something that must be studied better.
Or maybe just shut down everything with a lot of battery left, and make sure that timeout timers on the host will not kill the guest while it's still performing its shutdown procedure.
wbrd@reddit
You got it right. One ups per physical machine. I don't have anything that would be catastrophic if the proverbial plug got pulled on a VM so it's more curiosity than anything.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
You can run one UPS per node (better redundancy) or two UPS for the whole cluster (one for every power rail on the servers, with double power supply). In the second case, you need to have the management network switches under UPS too, so the UPS software can work over the net to be aware of the power status (on every host). This is because Proxmox does not manage the power status natively.
Hamburgerundcola@reddit
My company uses veeam for everything but M365. For those Active Backup M365 on a Synology is used. Works well. Although I never witnessed a restore from it.
RestartRebootRetire@reddit
I've used Synology M365 to restore individual emails so it works at that level anyway.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Me too. Never actuallty tried a full recovery.
Veldern@reddit
I have, works decent. However, something to keep in mind is it stops backing up when an account is disabled. If the account is still licensed and people are still editing a shared document on the account's OneDrive, it will not backup those changes. Editing like this can continue while the account is in the first stage recycle bin on Entra, too, and until the account goes into the secondary recycle bin. That's when people it's shared with actually lose access to it
Also, as long as you didn't change the defaults, you can still restore the account from the secondary recycle bin using the SharePoint Shell. I've had to do this a couple times now because of Shadow IT that I wasn't able to root out quickly enough....
Also also, Forms are not saved. At all. Once the account is deleted those are gone and I have never been able to restore them. Do not save important forms on personal accounts, put all of those on SharePoint
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Thanks for the info. I only have email for that customer and I suppose no accounts will be disabled without the email being saved locally in a PST file or something like this. I'm not competent enough on 365, I have a colleague managing it.
Veldern@reddit
For sure, and my apologies on the wall of text. Ran into this recently and am still pissed because someone changed that default settings I mentioned on me...
Kurgan_IT@reddit
There is nothing wrong in a detailed description unless it's AI slop. Thanks for using your time to type a long complete description that is indeed helpful. I'm not a user, I appreciate information and I tend to read long posts, not only one row as users do. :-)
DapperDone@reddit
Proxmox for the on prem hosting and Synology for 365 backup. It’s about as good as it gets for the smb space.
jake04-20@reddit
Synology Active Backup for Business and Hyper Backup are great products too.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Hope they don't become enshittified (they will)
sulylunat@reddit
Funnily enough when all of this new VMware Broadcom stuff happened last year, the first thing I did was start to look sat alternatives and I started testing proxmox at home. Ended up rebuilding my home setup on proxmox, ended up sticking with VMware for another year as the price wasn’t as bad as we feared but finally ditching it in a few weeks time.
shimoheihei2@reddit
Lots of companies are moving to Proxmox, it's a great solution in my opinion. Sure there are some specific use cases that might keep you in vCenter, but for most SMBs the move just makes sense.
jake04-20@reddit
As someone that does not feel confident/proficient in their linux administration skills and intimidated by Proxmox VE running on a debian host, is there anything you recommend doing to get more comfortable? I've done extensive labbing with Proxmox, and the web UI for that is straight forward enough. But if anything falls on its face and I need to go to the proxmox host itself, I feel like a fish out of water.
fadingcross@reddit
It's easier than ever today with LLM's, you don't have to have kung-fu-cli skills anymore.
I'd look up Linux fundamentals course on YouTube, honestly if you know infrastructure and you just need to learn how Linux internals works as they differ a little bit from Windows, you're good to go.
It's not that big of a difference. Both are just kernels running a bunch processes on hardware with the help of drivers. The fundamentals of computing is the same.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
I wil not let a LLM near my console.
fadingcross@reddit
Then you're an idiot.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
It would be better to understand Linux to run Proxmox. And really understanding Linux is something that requires years. But after all, how many Windows admins do really understand Windows? Or how many Vmware admins do really understand Vmware? Some for sure, but not everyone.
Linux is also changing quite a lot (becoming worse mostly) in the last 15 years, because somehow (money) the focus has shifted from being an operating system to being a scaffold for containers and cloud. And for this there are Red Hat and Canonical to blame. So as a long standing Linux admin, I'm currently in need to understand how the internals have changed.
fadingcross@reddit
Horse shit.
Horse shit pt 2.
If you have a problem with cloud and containers, you're so out of date I don't know where to begin.
Oh yeah mangling 5 different package versions that were needed for different software was so fun.
f0cusAU@reddit
Honestly you just need to get more hands on in CLI. If you keep finding ways to manage things via GUI - you won’t get the exposure that will begin to make you comfortable, learn how troubleshooting works, understand how to navigate around and find what you need.
Homelab stuff has been really beneficial, just standing services up in Linux, following guides - troubleshooting issues. Exposure is how you learn.
ReptilianLaserbeam@reddit
Nooo another one??!?!?! I moved away from VMware because of this and now Veeam too??? I don't have the patience or the time to set up another backup solution T.T
Kurgan_IT@reddit
If you are on Hyper-V, I know people that use Acronis. I'm not into Windows so I can't help more than that.
br01t@reddit
+1. We also migrated 15 vmware hosts to proxmox with ceph nvme storage. Proxmox backup instead of veeam. Never again vmware/veeam because of the cost savings.
somersetyellow@reddit
They were acquired by an investment firm (at least partly private equity) in 2020.
Sometimes takes time but they'll always go on a wild streak of enshittification eventually....
Kurgan_IT@reddit
This explains what's happening
Livid_Ad_1841@reddit
As an MSP who offers various services, including worry-free backups for numerous businesses, I frequently faced licensing issues with my previous backup software. Switching to Nakivo has resolved these problems entirely. Both my accounting and technical teams are still grateful for that decision I made.
Lando_uk@reddit
They still offer socket renewals if you're already on it.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Yeah literally just had a call from the VAR saying this should be still possible - it wasn't mentioned before.
GMginger@reddit
Only constraint I've seen so far is that legacy socket based licenses can't be used with their new Linux based VBR appliance - so you're forced to stick with a Windows based VBR server. Probably not an issue for you, but just be aware it's a thing.
carpetflyer@reddit
Also socket licenses can only protect Hyper-V and VMware.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
I tried to install the appliance on a Microserver and I literally could not get past the disk selection part of the installer, so I just installed good old Debian with XFS and it went without a hitch.
bagaudin@reddit
You can consider our Acronis Cyber Protect as alternative.
One virutal host license covers entire server and currently (%20 discount when purchased from the website) the price ranges from EUR 452 to 807 depending on the edition you choose.
In addition to that you can make use of migration promo which can get you a %50 discount.
International-Job212@reddit
We really talkin about a few hundred bucks...go waste someone elses time
Catsrules@reddit
Since when is £4,885 difference in price a few hundred buck?
International-Job212@reddit
In business expenses....idk since 1980...
Catsrules@reddit
I get the cost is "small" but it is a percentage that really kills me. How do I manage an IT budget when things are making massive percent increases.
Are you just asking for a 600% increase in next year's IT budget?
International-Job212@reddit
Pls computer increase cost alone trumps this, like any other budget, u take from 1 to another but a few hundred bucks shouldnt move ur budget much. Guess what o365 is increasin again in a few months...u gonna cancel that....doubtful...
Catsrules@reddit
Like is said already, it isn't the amount but the percentage.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Uhh you're wasting your own time by participating in a thread that doesn't interest you.
ZippySLC@reddit
Found OP's Veeam account rep
PDQ_Brockstar@reddit
Have you looked at Nakivo? Should be pretty comparible but more smb friendly
_MyCola_@reddit
I’ve been paying Nakivo the same price for software renewals for 5 years now. I’m even starting to wonder if everything is okay with their pricing strategy 🙂
Good to see that releases are still coming every quarter and new features are being rolled out, so I guess everything is fine.
Illustrious-Can-5602@reddit
checking out Nakivo as well, are there any mehs you can think of?
_MyCola_@reddit
It really depends on the environment, but right now I’m missing LXC container support for PVE and post-backup AV scanning.
StealthSingh@reddit
meh...switched to Vinchin last year. Does everything that I need at a fraction of cost. Backing up 11 hosts, to local storage, then backup copy to Local NAS, and also to Wasabi. In addition some critical servers directly to Wasabi Also. Linux based Nas backs up to external storage weekly. External Storage has Units. So essentially 3 weeks on external offline drives.
Illustrious-Can-5602@reddit
are there any concerns from your team or client that Vinchin is a chinese run company?
EachAMillionLies@reddit
I just renewed this week. Ours only went from $17.8k/year to $18.9k/year.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Does indeed seem to be they're trying to price out SMBs.
ZealousidealFudge851@reddit
You guys remember when VSphere and Veeam where cool as hell? Take me back.
NoSellDataPlz@reddit
I’m not defending their pricing. I’m simply explaining where they’re coming from.
SMBs are not where their money is. Broadcom also knows this, which is why they’re trying to shed their SMB business. SMB require just as much or more support hours (because large businesses or enterprises can afford to have a platform specialist who knows the specific software inside and out and doesn’t have to contact support often) while SMBs typically have hat racks for staff who regularly have to contact support. So, more support hours means less profit and more expenses because of the required man hours. Regardless, they’re making up the windfall by eliminating SMB friendly pricing and license levels.
Where do you go from here? No clue. FOSS solution? Up to you. Pay the increased cost move to a new product offering.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Funnily enough, in my ~15 years of being a sysadmin, I have called/requested support from VMWare, Broadcom, Microsoft, exactly zero times. I think I put in one ticket maybe with Veeam.
Pretty annoying that their strategy isn't exactly surgical and they're pricing out technically self-sufficient SMBs.
badaboom888@reddit
main problem is this is not the norm at scale.
On the vendor side they would have the stats on who calls and which market segment they sit in and what the cost to support ratio for that segment is.
This seems to be a certain trend now, adopt smb’s and tech to drive engagement when starting out as the business grows enshitification takes over
EViLTeW@reddit
It probably is the "norm at scale". The problem is you're not considering what scale means in this case.
If you have 1000 clients who each pay you $1,000/year for their licenses and, as a group, they average 0.001 cases per year; you're making $1m in licensing per support case.
Also, if you have 5 client that pays $1m/year for their licenses and they average 1 case per year, you're making $1m in licensing per support case.
I don't think there's where the money is lost, honestly.
If you have 1,000 clients who each pay you $1,000/year for their licenses and it takes 10 sales reps to handle all of the licenses and renewals, you're making $100,000 per sales FTE.
Also, if you have 5 client that pays $1m/year for their licenses and it takes 1 sales rep to handle all of the licenses and renewals, you're making $5m per sales FTE.
That's where I think the bean counters find the pennies to make investors happy.
DerpyNirvash@reddit
Then automate away the sales reps. For an SMB you don't need negotiated pricing, just sell the license normally through an online marketplace.
EViLTeW@reddit
They could, but that would require being honest/public about pricing and almost no one wants to do that. They want to hide their pricing or start with a grossly inflated "list price" that gets tweaked based on how much they think they can fleece you for while also making you feel good for getting a "discount".
NoSellDataPlz@reddit
Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly how salesmen work. They get paid on a percentage cut of what they bring in. The more profit, the bigger the payout. The salesman’s job is to find the highest feasible price the customer will pay. That vacillates from customer to customer. The salesman may offer SMB of 100 people $20 per license and then turn around and offer SMB of 70 people $18 per license because that’s the best price they could convince the customer to pay.
NoSellDataPlz@reddit
Don’t forget the cost of employment. If 1 sales rep and 1 technical guy can support the 5 large enterprises vs 10 sales reps and 10 technical guys for the SMBs, that’s an additional cost of over $1,000,000, probably getting close to $2,000,000 vs the big bois.
EViLTeW@reddit
The cost of employment is the entire point.
NoSellDataPlz@reddit
Yeah, I see that now - my mind was spinning through other metrics like KPIs and other metrics to evaluate maximum value per customer.
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
Is this really true though? I can't see VMWare actually saying, "Oh boy, Joe Jr., the "CTO" of Joe's Tile Hut just called in his 30th P0 ticket this month for his 2-node cluster of DL380s and the Synology in the broom closet again."
Vendor support as it is is so awful, even with expensive contracts, that most people don't bother using it.
badaboom888@reddit
they would absolutely collect this data.
Not for a specific customer but for sure (what version) is being supported (smb’s) are generally using lower tier versions, the type of issues would be given a rating, how many hours are spent per issue and the cost to provide that support.
EViLTeW@reddit
Our environment is quite a bit bigger than yours based on your quote prices.
I've called VMWare support once, and despite my repeatedly asking if the tech was positive we could re-add the host without a reboot and her assuring me that it would absolutely work... It didn't, and we had to use unscheduled downtime to shut down the VMs and host to get it back in the cluster. I got a call 2 days later from a "supervisor" apologizing profusely and repeatedly stating that the tech had been "retrained".
I've called Microsoft dozens of times. Because O365/M365 is glitchy as fuck at times. Almost every call is a goat rodeo and requires being escalated to a "senior engineer" (not senior, not engineer) - who also usually can't fix it but is allowed to talk to the actual senior engineers behind the scenes and those guys fix it eventually... or we find a way to work around the issue ourselves.
Kurgan_IT@reddit
Typical support experience in the pre-AI era. Soon it will be AI and you will get wrong answers from AI instead of humans.
brisull@reddit
Heh heh.... Goat rodeo. Going to remember that one....
DominusDraco@reddit
I fear the person I work with is the culprit. He just logs every error he sees with Veeam without even bothering to google the error.
Every single one of my colleagues is incompetent 😔
d00ber@reddit
I've called for support from VMWare, pretty much once to report a bug with Horizon, which they released an updated version 3 months later with a fix, which was awesome!
That said, I've worked with some technicians that leaned way too heavily on vmware support in the past, which was shocking to me considering how good the docs are.
I personally have never heard of anyone needing to call VEEAM support.
tobias3@reddit
If you report actual bugs, it is a plus for the vendor. Problem is those that need hand-holding or don't RTFM.
d00ber@reddit
Yeah, I completely agree. I had a tech at my last company who had a lot of knowledge gaps but after a lot of mentoring pretty much stopped calling support. They had a lack of network knowledge, not great troubleshooting and constantly thought there were issues with VMKernels and often couldn't tell the difference between Dell and VMWare issues. It was wild that he was the lead systems engineer at the time lol Luckily, he was willing to learn.
gregsting@reddit
I am currently trying to convince upper management we don’t need support contracts for MySQL. They are not comfortable with that 😅
Old_Ad_208@reddit
My employer is an SMB. I've been working with VMWare here at my employer since version 3.5. I can count on one hand how many times we have opened a case with VMWare over the past ten years. I can't recall how many cases we opened in the first five years.
d00ber@reddit
It's wild to me specifically, like I get they aren't getting huge money from SMBs but with that being said.. Do SMBs cost them much money? I'd love to hear about anyone else's experience, but I've never had to make a ticket for deployment, troubleshooting or issues with veeam at any point nor have I worked for a place that I've heard of having issues with veeam.
VMmware, though I don't agree with.. I totally understand. I've seen some SMBs lean almost entirely on vmware support during deployment, troubleshooting..etc, which is crazy to me considering how good their documentation used to be.
Both of these are only observation, I'm sure it's purely an experienced based observation with no merit. Would love to hear others experience.
JWK3@reddit
Multiple SMBs will almost always have a lot more issues than the equivalent single enterprise. Think about 10 environments with their own vCenter, AD, storage arrays, security software etc. , compared to an enterprise that has the same amount of protected VMs, but all running the same config.
d00ber@reddit
No, I get it. Nobody wants to provide support anymore because it costs money. I think it's just hard to come to grasp with how shit enterprise software has become and how even worse support is constantly getting.
I'm just over here in denial and sad lol
Defiant-Badger-8268@reddit
As you are a current Veeam user, I see that the best alternative for you is to switch to Nakivo like we did, as it offers the same features with the availability of perpetual licenses still under a very affordable pricing model.
Alone-Warthog7421@reddit
558% increase is insane. We're in the same boat - Veeam Essentials went from ~$900/yr to $1,800 for half the VMs. Already testing Proxmox as a backup. The writing on the wall is clear: if you can't beat Broadcom at being greedy, switch to open source.
bloodguard@reddit
Private Equity (in this case Insight Partners) "enshitification". I've seen double, triple and more price increases to products we use after private equity companies take over (Bitwarden, VMWare, Retrospect backup).
It never ends.
chum-guzzling-shark@reddit
Is that why the installer is 20 gb? It's insane
somersetyellow@reddit
Was Bitwarden snatched by Private Equity too? I don't see anythingn on it.
Their pricing has shot up for sure though.
bloodguard@reddit
Not 100% snatched but:
Need to make that $100 million investment pay off. So... squeeze.
somersetyellow@reddit
Oh darn, yeah they're toast too.
I suppose another open source solution similar to it will pop up to replace it sooner than later. But harder to say if it'll be as enterprise friendly.
nVME_manUY@reddit
If you have socket licensing you can renew it, stay on vdp essentials socket if you can (granted it only covers VMware or hyper-v)
Wonderful-Income7415@reddit
Welcome to the VUL era. Veeam is basically doing a "Broadcom speedrun" with their pricing lately. If you are on a tight budget and don't need the enterprise bells and whistles, it might be time to look at Nakivo or even Proxmox Backup Server if you're feeling brave. Paying 558% more for the same bits is insane.
Servior85@reddit
You had essentials. VUL is enterprise plus features. That is where the big difference comes from.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
The quote was for Veeam Data Platform Essentials, the equivalent to what we had.
Servior85@reddit
No. VDP essentials is feature equivalent to foundation, but limited to 50 instances. Still Enterprise Plus Features.
The old socket based license was unlimited VMs and had different editions. You had essentials and not enterprise plus.
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Ah gotcha.
ThecaptainWTF9@reddit
Yeah that’s a change in SKU beyond what you need likely.
Our renewals for customers aren’t going up like this; you’re getting upsold or your rep isn’t playing nice.
Most of our customers we’ve moved to rental licensing through us, financially just makes more sense for their sizes vs doing a perpetual license renewal, we’re literally saving them money.
useless_ladder@reddit
Is the price increase due to them going from per socket to per machine protected?
bingblangblong@reddit (OP)
Yeah
highroller038@reddit
That price ain't bad. I was quoted $4,266 for B&R Foundation, 3-year, 10 VMs. You could renew for 3 or 5 years to lock in a good price. It will only continue to go up.
actionjsic@reddit
We offer rental Veeam to our customers and luckily we have a contract. I’m guessing for 2027 I’m in for a shock. Broadcoms BS will have a cascading effect because Veeam is best for backing up VMware. With everyone getting priced out of VMware that means less growth and demand, that’s the thing the execs are scared of. No growth = stock price go down.
ITfreshman@reddit
Switched to hornetsecurity
BigLadTing@reddit
afi.ai is goated friend.
macro_franco_kai@reddit
Your competent IT&C department should switch to FOSS, there are many options :)
DarkAlman@reddit
Looks like they are trying to upgrade you to VUL (enterprise).
Ask your VAR for a renewal of essentials
sgt_Berbatov@reddit
All I know is that from when we renewed Veeam last month, our new "provider" said they'd be slightly more expensive than the incumbent. But renewals with the same reseller tend to be less in the next renewal. They were expensive, by about £30 for the year. So we switched because the incumbent were shit.
That's all I can help you on I'm afraid.