Question Progress charge for backing up VM's?

[Chris Hughes]

Hi All

I wondered if I could ask a general question about your understanding of backing up our Progress solutions and databases.

My understanding is that if you backup your database / solution for the purpose of restoring it in a failure scenario then there is no license charge. This was obviously very clear cut in the days of tape backups etc.
My opinion has always been that backing up a VM and storing that image in a non running state is no different to tape.

I think now, although there is some confusion, we are potentially being told that backing up a VM and copying that to another location in a switched off state is classed as replication and therefore must be paid for.

Any help / advice appreciated.

Thanks

Chris.

 

[Cringer]

Who is (possibly) telling you this? Don't want to presume...

 

[Chris Hughes]

Hi

One of our sales guys, who believes this had come from Progress as part of an updated contract.
As I say lots of confusion and I'm at the lower end of the food chain so don't get to view contracts etc.

Just wondered whether anybody has any statement from Progress as to what can / can't be done relating to real world technologies as opposed to legal talk.

Cheers

 

[Cringer]

It's always worth talking to Progress Sales about this sort of thing directly rather than trying to understand the legalese. Most people, even Progress employees not in sales, don't even deign to try and understand the vagaries of the licensing strategies.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

AFAIK, whether you need to license a standby depends on the license model ( concurrent user / registered device / named user, etc. ) and whether your backup solution is considered a standby. The concurrent user licensing model was available only up to V9. With OE10 Progress introduced the other two models. But they did allow existing customers to keep the concurrent user model up till now ( we are such an existing customer who now uses concurrent user model in OE11 ).

As far as I understand it, with the concurrent user model you must license a standby - usually half the price. With the registered device / named user model you are free to install the server licenense on as many servers as you like - which would include any standby.

This should at least give you pointers when talking to a hostile Progress sales rep.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[Chris Hughes]

Thanks RealHeavy, interesting.

The customer that has triggered this are concurrent - do Progress allow us to switch to named free of charge, or should I ask is there a price difference between 1 conncurrent vs 1 named usually.

Your "standby" point is the part I struggle with, as once upon a time I was an end user. I would class a standby as a machine that is running and has its own hostname / IP. In this case a copy of a VM is just a file until somebody presses play, with the same hostname / IP, so the live server would have to be dead to switch it on in the first place.

Cheers

 

[RealHeavyDude]

AFAIK there is no "free of charge" switch as the registered device / named user licenses are more expensive than the concurrent ones. Most Progress sales reps I had contact with tried to talk us into doing that switch - I assume for exactly that reasion.

Honestly I can't tell wether backing up a VM qualifies as a standby - but I seriously doubt that. I wouldn't even have asked that question, I would have just backed up the VM without worrying about the Progress licenses. But then again, maybe I am just techie ...

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I can only speak in general terms about North American pricing; there is a separate price list for EMEA which I haven't seen. But here, the Named User and Registered Client models are considerably cheaper per user than Concurrent User, per user; roughly 30%. You do have to bear in mind though that they have different definitions of what a user is, and they have different user-counting methodologies.

There are other differences between the models as well. As RHD indicated, Named User and Registered Client are multi-server license models, whereas Concurrent User is a single-server model. So the former can be installed on multiple servers (same platform of course), including DR, and the latter must be licensed separately for each box, with DR-specific licenses available for a 50% discount on licensing and maintenance.

You can't necessarily always "switch" licenses freely (free as in easy or free as in beer), but provided you are paid up on maintenance you certainly can trade in a license on one model for an equivalent license on another model. If the trade-in value of the current license (shown on your Media Status report) equals or exceeds the license cost of the new license, it's free. (If it's more, PSC doesn't write you a cheque for the difference ) If it's less, you just pay the difference. So when I move a client from Concurrent User to Named User, it is usually inexpensive and often free; I've done this several times. But of course it does depend on your mix of client and your user counts.

Say you have a customer with 150 defined application users (i.e. people and processes), a high water mark of 100 concurrent remote users (Win32), 10 server-side batch clients (AIX), and a compiler on each platform, all Concurrent User. Two boxes, Prod and UAT. They might have a set of licenses like this:

Prod                              
Client Networking  Win32  100   UBP
Enterprise RDBMS   AIX64  102   UBP
4GL Dev System     Win32    1   UBP
4GL Dev System     AIX64    1   UBP
                                  
UAT                               
Client Networking  Win32   20   UBP
Enterprise RDBMS   AIX64   22   UBP
4GL Dev System     Win32    1   UBP
4GL Dev System     AIX64    1   UBP

Note no licenses for the batch users. In Concurrent, you don't count them if they are outnumbered by the remote users. You just count whichever set of clients has the greater number. And you don't license all 150 users as they don't all log in at the same time.

Under Named User, the requirements might look like this:

Prod/UAT
Client Networking  Win32  150   NBP
Client Networking  AIX64   10   NBP
Enterprise RDBMS   AIX64  162   NBP
4GL Dev System     Win32    1   NBP
4GL Dev System     AIX64    1   NBP

"UBP" = Concurrent User model; "NBP" = Named User model. Note that model is per-license, not for all of your licenses as a whole.

In the Named User case, because of the different definition of what a "user" is, you must separately license the server-side clients. And you must license all 150 people, no matter how often they log in.

But if you were moving a client from Concurrent to Named pricing, you could trade in your 100-user Client Networking and your 20-user Client Networking licenses and apply the trade-in value of them toward the purchase of the 15o-user NBP Client Networking license. Same goes for other products. Obviously the server-side Client Networking license is net new so you'd pay full price for that. So in a case like this it is pretty much close to a wash for the license cost. But the kicker is that the seats are cheaper: that means that annual maintenance, which is a fixed percentage of license cost, is cheaper every year from now on. So even if you had to pay some money up front for the trade-in, the switch pays for itself down the road due to lower maintenance costs.

I mentioned that the model applies individually to each license because they may not all be the same. Yes, you do have to match clients and servers. For example if you just had one server license and one client license, you wouldn't have the server license (e.g. Enterprise RDBMS) on Concurrent User while the clients (e.g. Client Networking) that connect to it are on Named User. Both would be on the same model. But you can have a mix of models in one system.

Example: take the Named User system above but add a WebSpeed web application component to the mix. So you have end users out on the internet (classified as "Unknown Users") connecting to this application through a web portal (in addition to the other users mentioned above). WebSpeed is no longer sold as a separate product with that name. From a licensing perspective it is the same as AppServer. AppServer is available under three models: Named User, Registered Client, and Access Agent (and a fourth, Concurrent User, if you're grandfathered because you had it with a v9 license originally). Named User or Registered Client models are for use with Standard Users or Occasional Users, but not Unknown Users. Access Agents are for use with Unknown Users, but not the other two user types. So in this case you would buy client-side and server-side Access Agent (AAP) licenses for AppServer. So assuming you want to install the AppServer server-side, your requirements might now look like this:

Prod/UAT
Client Networking    Win32  150   NBP
Client Networking    AIX64   10   NBP
Enterprise RDBMS     AIX64  162   NBP
4GL Dev System       Win32    1   NBP
4GL Dev System       AIX64    1   NBP
Enterprise AppServer AIX64    5   AAP
Enterprise RDBMS     AIX64    5   AAP

A few things to note:

• It is no longer the case that all of your licenses are on the same model.
  
• You now have two database licenses, even though you have one database. You only install one on the server, say, the 150-user license. The second one is sometimes called a paper license. You need it for compliance, but it's never installed anywhere (at least until PSC's installer gets more sophisticated; don't hold your breath).
• AppServer is a product that has a user-count minimum; for Enterprise it is 5.
  
• In this context, AppServer is a client license. Each WebSpeed agent is a database client.
• If you buy 5 Access Agents on the client side (AppServer), you buy 5 Access Agents on the server side (RDBMS).
• You don't have to do something silly like match the AppServer user count to the Client Networking user count (I've heard from people who have been told that), or license every user of the web portal (there could be hundreds or thousands; think web banking for example). The Access Agent is intrinsically a many-to-one model, which is why it is much more expensive per seat than Named or Registered. But specifically when used under the Access Agent model, you count the AppServer/WebSpeed agents, not the people who connect through them. There are other cases where you may license AppServers under the Named User model, in which case they are the same price per seat as Client Networking, and similar rules apply. AppServer can be used in a lot of different ways so unfortunately there is no simple, straightforward "here's how you license AppServer" rule you can always apply (much to the chagrin of some people I won't mention...).

Also note: the above represents my best understanding of how licensing works, today, in my region. YMMV. But I can be wrong and the above can change over time.

Educate yourself. Get a copy of the price list. Get a copy of the OpenEdge licensing guide; the latest one came out in December 2013. It describes license attributes, like models, types, platforms, user definitions, counting methodologies, etc. Get it and read it before you talk to Progress about purchases or trade-ins. And when you do talk to them and they provide licensing requirement opinions, get them in writing. Good luck.

 

[Chris Hughes]

Rob fantastic post can't thank you enough.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

And for what it's worth, I don't believe there is any additional licensing requirement for backing up a VM image, provided you're only going to use that backup to restore the environment that was backed up. For example, you have a prod VM, you back it up on a regular basis, at some point the VM image becomes corrupt and can't be started. So you restore the backup of the VM and start it, as prod. No problem, no licensing requirement.

If you were going to take that backup and restore it on different hardware and run it as UAT or DR, that's a different story. You would need additional licenses.

 

[TomBascom]

Read and understand Rob's post *before* you consider talking to a sales person.

Get a copy of the relevant policy guides and *read* them before talking to sales.

DO NOT START BY CALLING SALES.

Sales has one, and only one, motivation. To sell you stuff. If you believe in fairy tales "good sales people" take a long view and don't just shaft you whenever you call. They want your business over the long run and will help you make good long term decisions. I would not, however, assume that the person you talk to takes this view.

Sales has a long history of outrageous behaviours. Platform change fees, name change "relicensing" fees, double licensing for app server users, POA agreements, web licensing schemes involving billions of "users", etc, etc. They have no shame and if they smell the tiniest whiff of opportunity there is no going back. Be very, very, very careful what you ask them and be as well prepared as possible before starting any conversation with them.

 

[Chris Hughes]

And for what it's worth, I don't believe there is any additional licensing requirement for backing up a VM image, provided you're only going to use that backup to restore the environment that was backed up. For example, you have a prod VM, you back it up on a regular basis, at some point the VM image becomes corrupt and can't be started. So you restore the backup of the VM and start it, as prod. No problem, no licensing requirement.

If you were going to take that backup and restore it on different hardware and run it as UAT or DR, that's a different story. You would need additional licenses.

Yes Rob - and therein lies the problem. Customer backs up their VM, if only that VM goes wrong they would restore it on the Prod hardware. But (big but) if the whole site goes down they would bring it up at DR site.

You know in an age of so much DB competition Progress needs to stop thinking like Oracle and look at the bigger picture. These licensing rules will turn customers away

Thanks

Also Thanks Tom for your input, knowledge is power, and I gotta do some reading

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I agree that Progress sales people shouldn't ignore their own rules, and that Progress should take a long view of managing client relationships and business growth. But I also feel that Progress deserves to be paid where they deliver real business value. Being able to run your business in a DR scenario delivers value. I don't think you will find any vendor who delivers complete DR solutions for free. But you can actually come pretty close with Progress, depending on which licenses and license models you have.

First off, I would say that if your customer really cares about disaster preparation then relying on VM backups alone is not the way to go. They can be large and take a long time to restore, and of course you hope they aren't corrupt. When disaster hits, is the business going to rely on starting a restore of last night's VM backup and waiting for it to finish? And how much of today's data will be gone forever? That approach might make sense for a 9-5 business with very modest RPO/RTO requirements. (RPO: how much data can the business afford to lose in a disaster? RTO: how long can the business afford to be down after a disaster?)

It is better to evaluate what data you have in production and how often it changes, and devise a strategy for ensuring each is reliably backed up and migrated to DR on a schedule that makes sense: OS binaries, OS configuration files, application code, application configuration, database data. Some files change monthly, some perhaps daily; DB data obviously may change by the second. A typical pattern I see, in addition to nightly system backups, is regular rsync of application code and configuration files to the DR file system, and shipping of database data on a schedule that meets the needs of the business. That would involve either AI log shipping and roll forward to a DR DB or OE Replication Plus for near-real-time streaming of prod DB changes to the DR DB. Of course nightly DB backups happen either way and they are shipped off-site (and hopefully tested regularly ).

How much the DR portion costs you in terms of licensing depends on your situation. Are you entirely on multi-server licenses like Named User or Registered Client? Great! Then installing your licenses on your DR is allowed and it is free. Do you have a mix of multi-server licenses and single-server licenses (like Concurrent User or Access Agent)? Then you can re-use your multi-server licenses on DR and you buy a new set of your single-server licenses for DR. The user quantities have to be the same as prod but the DR-specific licenses and maintenance qualify for a 50% discount. Is your RDBMS license on a single-server model? In that case if you buy OE Replication Plus, it includes the DR database license for free.

Do you need OE Replication Plus or AI log shipping? That depends on your RPO/RTO and your budget. If you can stand to lose a few minutes or more of data in a disaster, AI log shipping will fulfill your needs and is no additional cost aside from your time spent on setup. If your requirements are stricter, use Replication Plus. It's really quite reasonably priced, in my opinion. And in addition to near-real-time replication it also allows you to replicate to two separate targets and to access those targets with read-only clients (e.g. for reporting). In either case (log shipping or replication), you also have to set up monitoring to ensure they are working on an ongoing basis.

So in summary, by all means back up your VMs. And back up the data within them. But don't rely on having to restore your VM backups as part of your disaster fail-over script. Have the VMs already in place and running on DR, and replicate data into them on an ongoing basis with a means and a schedule that suits the data. And if you migrate all of your licenses to Named User or Registered Client, then you get all your production Progress licenses for use in DR, for free. Can the DB competition match that?

 

[TomBascom]

Just to be clear -- I have nothing against Progress being paid for providing value. However I have seen far too many sales people gouge unwary customers on the flimsiest of pretexts (not just Progress sales either). They are not all evil and most of the ones who have been around for a while are actually pretty good.

I would simply *NEVER* advise anyone to call sales with licensing questions without first doing their homework. That is a classic case of asking the fox to guard the hen-house.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I would simply *NEVER* advise anyone to call sales with licensing questions without first doing their homework.

I completely agree.

 

[Chris Hughes]

Rob your level of detail is fantastic.

I absolutely agree with what you have said. I should explain that I work for a software house, used to work for an end user.

The customer base includes those who use OE replication and some that ship and roll forward AI files. And these customers understand risk enough to invest in an active DR solution.

Some of our software solutions sold have sub 6 users, they effectively accept an RPO of 24 hours as the online backup runs once a night. It is this end of the scale I was asking about.

As said I've got a whole lot of reading to do, maybe the answer is named users.

Thanks