Licensing - Migration of Physical Servers to Virtual Servers

Hi there,

I've been searching through these forums for my question, but it seems no one has asked my specific query as yet.

Basically, our company is running through a server consolidation project to virtualise existing physical servers onto virtual servers. Before you say anything, I know you don't support using Acronis Tru Image with virtual servers and this is not my question.

The migration process uses a product called P2V Assistant provided by VMware which handles the physical to virtual migration process, but a 3rd party imaging software product is often used to create the intial image. In my scenario, I would love to use your product for this as it would allow us to migrate servers remotely due to the ability to image a machine without rebooting to DOS. I have already tested this and it works perfectly.

However, my question is bound to licensing. From many other posts, I note your licensing policy is you need one license per machine used - this makes sense if you are using it for backup and DR, however, in my case, I would be imaging each server only once, then running VMware's P2V Assistant to translate this image to a virtual machine. Once this has occurred, our normal backup and DR procedures come into play and Acronis is never required on that machine again.

In this instance therefore, is there a special license agreement process where one license can be used to image many virtual machines, providing this license is only installed in one machine at a time i.e. once the first server is imaged and virtualised, the product is uninstalled from this server. Once uninstalled, can it then be installed on another machine and the process repeated? Due to the scale of the project, in reality, it would be more likely for us to purchase 10-20 licenses of Tru Image rather than just 1 to allow us to carry out 10-20 concurrent images but you get the idea!

The reasoning for this is obvious, if I require a license for every machine I intend to image only once, the cost would be prohibitive and I would have to use a competitor's product instead (and visit each of our sites personally which would really be a pain!).

If this is possible, it would be a great boost to the project and would also be something I would look to use within our clients' consolidation projects (as our company is one of the leading VMware consultancies in the UK and I myself am a VCP) which would further enhance your product - I know I'm being obvious!!

Thanks for your help, hoping for a positive answer!

Antony

 

Hello Antony,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that according to Acronis software licensing policy, you should purchase one copy of Acronis program per every computer where it will be used.

If after certain actions the result is equal to the use of Acronis software on N computers (being installed, or used from the bootable CD) you should purchase N licenses.

Please visit Acronis online store to purchase Acronis True Image software.

Please note that we have a flexible system of discounts and the amount of the discount varies depending on the number of copies you want to purchase.

In case you are planning to purchase many copies, please contact our Sales Team at sales@acronis.com.

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply, it seems I will therefore need to use a competitor's product as charging me nigh on £400 to use the software once on one machine is ridiculous.

Someone else pointed me at Snap Deploy which I'm investigating as it is much cheaper, but initial tests show it's not flexible enough for our needs (hence the price difference I'm sure!).

Do you think there will ever be any thought into either a) a new license structure to work alongside VMware's P2V product or b) a new product which would work alongside it and be licensed accordingly?

The way I see it, vitrualisation is taking off in a big way and your product compliments it well at the moment - an early foray here could well give you a good market share if it was marketed towards being used for this, I don't know of many other cheap solutions to this.

Up to you guys I guess, for me I will probably have to use Symantec now.

Many thanks,

Antony

 

Hello Antony,

First of all, please be aware that all of the currently available Acronis True Image versions support VMWare.

Please also note that we will most likely be able to provide you with some kind of a special license, but it will be much better to contact our Sales Team rather than Support Team on this matter. I would therefore recommend you to send a letter describing your issue to sales@acronis.com along with the link to this thread. You will be contacted by the respective sales person shortly.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Sorry if I misinformed, it was replies in forums such as below:

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

I'm afraid that Acronis True Image 8.0 does not support VMware, so it can not work with it's virtual drives.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

that led me to believe you didn't!! I guess version 9 now does.

Thanks for the info, I shall see about contacting the sales team.

Many thanks, Antony