When only a V-Ray edition license is installed a license warning about physical machine protection may be received

Problem

Customers that have purchased and installed V-Ray edition licenses, but no licenses for other agents, may see a license alert regarding the protection of physical machines.  Typically, if seen, this license alert will be created at 04:00 (this is a default time but could be changed by time zone settings or maintenance timing configuration)

Error Message

License warning received via the Backup Exec Alerts:

"When V-Ray Edition is installed it does not cover protection of physical machines unless enough agent licenses have been purchased. It appears that you have exceeded the number of licenses for your Backup Exec environment. Review your license and maintenance contract information on the Backup Exec Home tab"

V-287-13310

Cause

This can be caused by running any form of traditional or agent based backup from a media server that is setup only with a V-Ray license, and as such should only run virtual agent backups.

The Backup Exec V-Ray Edition is licensed to protect only Virtual Machines and the Virtual Hosts on which they reside, unless additional Backup Exec Agents and/or Options are licensed to provide protection for physical systems.

Solution

If the quoted error is regularly received on your media server, then choose the most appropriate of the following options:

1. If one or more physical or virtual servers are being backed up using one of the remote agents and the scenario is not covered by points 2, 3 and 5 below, then purchase appropriate agent licenses due to non-compliance against licensing requirements

2. If the physical system being backed up is the media server itself then please ignore the error message and when the next full version of Backup Exec is released, consider an upgrade.

3. If the physical system being backed up is a Hyper-V host, where the protection is for critical file system and system state components of the host itself then please ignore the error message and when the next full version of Backup Exec is released, consider an upgrade.

4. If the physical system being backed up is a Hyper-V host, where the protection is for an application (MS Exchange for instance) installed directly on the Hyper-V host and not in a virtual machine, then purchase appropriate application agent licenses due to non-compliance against licensing requirements

5. If the server being protected is a virtual server where the configuration within the virtual server does not support GRT, but where all of the data is contained within virtual disk locations that are supported by non-GRT virtual server backups, and traditional agent backups are being run to workaround the GRT limitation, for instance due to requiring protection for an Exchange DAG environment with GRT, then please ignore the error message and when the next full version of Backup Exec is released, consider an upgrade.

6. If the server being protected is a virtual server where the configuration of the virtual server is not supported by non-GRT backups, for instance a Physical RDM disk or a disk attached via iSCSI into the operating system of the VM, then purchase appropriate agent or application agent licenses due to non-compliance against licensing requirements.