Licensing: Associating Virtual Agents with Hypervisors (4043770)

Starting with Rapid Recovery 6.2, you are now required to associate a Virtual Agent with a hypervisor in order to use CPU socket licensing with virtual machines protected with the agent software. This change allows a virtual machine to be protected with an agent and continue all backup functions using the agent technology, without charging 1 agent license per virtual machine. Instead, the virtual machine will become a child object of the hypervisor and take on the the hypervisor's per socket licensing.

Terms:

• Virtual Agent: A virtual machine that is protected with an Agent.
• Hypervisor: A VMware host, vCenter server, Hyper-V host, or Hyper-V cluster.

A single Rapid Recovery license can be used to license 1 physical agent, 1 virtual agent, or 1 CPU socket. The licenses are functionally interchangeable in the Rapid Recovery License Portal. Unless a virtual agent is linked to a hypervisor it will charge 1 agent license and consume 1 license from your license pool.

Note: Please note that following the steps in this article to link virtual agents to a hypervisor does not change the backup mechanism. The backups will still be taken using the agent software. This does NOT convert them to agentless backup technology. It only changes how licensing is charged. 

Note 2: Hyper-V hypervisors can only be added to agentless protection on one core at a time. This means all of your virtual machines protected with an agent must be protected by the same core server in order to properly link the machines for licensing".

Note 3: When protecting vCenter follow KB article 255896 to limit the number of hosts seen by Rapid Recovery to only the ESXi hosts that are running VMs being backed up.

To enable linking you must have the hypervisor that hosts the virtual agents added to the core console using agentless backup technology. To do this, you must protect at least one VM on that hypervisor with agentless protection. You do not have to keep that agent protected after you have linked your virtual agents, you simply have to use the agentless protection mechanism to authorize the core to connect to the hypervisor so that it can track CPU sockets on the hypervisor and validate that the virtual agents actually exist on that hypervisor host.

To protect a virtual machine using agentless protection please follow the steps in our user guide to use Rapid Snap for Virtual (agentless) protection.

Once a single virtual machine is protected using agentless backup technology you can then link virtual machines to the hypervisor. There are two ways to link existing virtual agents to a hypervisor. Steps are the same for Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors.

Bulk Link Virtual Agents to Hypervisor:

1. Open the Core console, navigate to the hypervisor's tab, and click on Link Agents:
2. In the Link Agents to this Hypervisor popup, choose the Virtual Agent(s) you would like to associate with the hypervisor, and click Link Agents:
3. The virtual agent will become a child object of the hypervisor and will no longer appear in the License Portal as a single agent charging you 1 agent license.

Link Single Virtual Agent to Hypervisor:

1. Open the Core console and navigate to the Virtual Agent's Settings:
2. In the General section, click on 'Not linked' next to Hypervisor to edit it and choose the Hypervisor you want to link the virtual agent to. Don't forget to click the check mark to save the changes:
3. The virtual agent will become a child object of the hypervisor and will no longer appear in the License Portal as a single agent charging you 1 agent license.