Transcript
Hi, welcome to the VCSP Tech Hub. My name is Brandon McCoy. Today's video, licensing, reporting, and Pulse integration in the Veeam Service Provider Console. So, let's take a quick look at the agenda. We're going to start with how you connect your Service Provider Console to Pulse. That's how we really get all of the other functionality, so it's a great place to start. We're going to show you how to manage your license keys, everything from creating, assigning, revoking, and how to push those keys out from the console. We're going to take a few moments to specifically talk about managing standalone agents through the Service Provider Console, because that works a little bit differently than the other Veeam products, and then we'll round things out with everything about reporting, from looking at your usage reports to how you can streamline the reporting process of your licenses monthly. We've got a lot to talk about, so let's jump right in. So, here we are in the Service Provider Console. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the configuration tab on the top right, and I'm actually going to start in the plug-in library right here. We're going to find the Pulse tile, click on that. So, in order to connect your Pulse to your Service Provider Console, we're going to click the configure tab. Now, quick note, if you're not familiar with Pulse, this is Veeam's online portal that is used to manage your licensing and to report your usage each month to your aggregator. Although you still have to go to Pulse for some operations, we can streamline a lot of that through the Service Provider Console, which is really what today's video is all about. So, you should already have a Pulse account. That's what you get when you first sign up as a service provider. Now, we're just simply connecting the Service Provider Console that you've stood up into Pulse. So, let's start by clicking the configure tab. It's going to ask for a token, and in order to get that, all you have to do is click the link here. It may ask you for your Pro Partner credentials. Make sure that you're the licensed administrator. The expiration date here should be set for one year. I tend to leave this alone. I believe you can change it to different dates. I'm going to go ahead and click generate. You'll copy and paste this key, and you'll put it right here, and you click connect. Once you've got that, you should have a green checkbox here, and now we're going to turn on these two radio buttons. So, this first one for company management is so that you can have a Service Provider Console company mapped to a Pulse company, and we're going to talk about when and why you would do that. There are some cases where you don't need a Pulse company entry, although it doesn't hurt to have one, and then the license key management. So, turning this on is going to allow you to create keys and push those keys out through the console. So, we'll go ahead and turn both of these on. Now this second tab here is for companies. So, as you can see, we've got VCSP Pulse companies, and we've got Veeam Service Provider Console companies. We have the ability to auto map, to manually map, and to merge companies. So let's talk about these options. Now first of all, what is the difference between a Service Provider Console company and a Pulse company? Well, a Service Provider Console company is a company in the Service Provider Console that you offer managed and backup services to. They have a profile associated with whatever Veeam products that they may have, while the Pulse company is a way to create a license and assign it to that company. So really, Pulse is just a place for you to be able to create an entry and create a key and assign it to the company. Mapping these together allows you to create a license, assign it to a company, and then merge that license out to the respective Veeam product that is assigned to the Service Provider Console company. So mapping these becomes important from a MSP management perspective in the console and a license management perspective from Pulse. So I can map the companies together. I can also have the Service Provider Console create Pulse companies every time I create a Service Provider Console company. So when I onboard a new customer, they're ready to receive a license from Pulse. If you've already set this up, you can have Veeam create a company after the fact up here, or you can just manually create these and then map them after the fact. Now the merge options. So let's say you have a customer who has a headquarters, and then you have a bunch of remote sites. So maybe you have a Pulse company entry for ABC Corp, and then you have three different Service Provider Console companies for East, West, and South for this same company. You can select all of these options and then click the merge, and what it will do is it will tell the Service Provider Console in Pulse that ABC company is the parent company, and then the East, West, and South companies are the child companies, so that they're all in this one type of category for one customer, and we can merge those so that you're able to manage the licensing. All right, let's go ahead and click the reseller tab. There's not a lot here. You know, the Veeam Service Provider Console has a resell white label functionality. So resellers that are white labeling your console, if you want them to be able to cut licenses for their customers, you know, you can manage the mapping there for them as well. But let's really get into the big part here, which is the license keys. So as you can see, I've already got quite a few keys here. We're just going to go ahead and create a new license. We'll select the product. So let's start with the most popular, so backup and replication. We'll select Enterprise Plus. If you'd like to put a description for the key, you can. That's optional. You'll notice I have automatic reporting turned on. We're going to talk about that later. If you haven't set up automatic reporting, this will be turned off, and it will also be grayed out. Towards the end of the video, I'll talk about auto-reporting and how you get that set up. For now, let's just click Next. We're going to add the workload. So keep in mind that backup and replication can manage agents, virtual machines, file shares, public cloud workloads, and some others. So you'll have a dropdown of all the different backup types that a specific Veeam server is going to manage. So let's say this one customer has 10 Veeams, and they also have a server. And you know what? They've also got some file shares. So I've got all these different workloads. I'll click Next. Review my information and click Finish. You can see the key down here at the bottom. It's not assigned. So the first thing I need to do is assign this license to a company. So let's click the License. We'll go to License Actions. We'll click Assign, and I'm going to select an in-customer. And let's pick Atlantis Technology. Okay, so we'll click Assign. Now, keep in mind that I've assigned this to the company that is a Pulse Entry, but I've not pushed this key out. So the customer would not expect to have a license just yet. It's just assigned to them. Now, I can go back. We're going to come down to the Licensing tab right here. We're going to find Veeam Backup and Replication, because that's what we just created a license for. We'll find the service provider console company whose backup and replication instance this belongs to. We created a license for Atlantis Technology. That appears to be this specific backup server, so we'll click it. From here, the license key will install. Now, you have the ability to install this license by pushing it directly from the service provider console. This is a huge time saver. You don't have to download the license, put it on a file share, go install that manually on the Veeam server. I can just say Install from Pulse. Now, the licenses that you will see here are licenses that are assigned to a Pulse customer. So if you create a key and you come in here, you click a Veeam server, you click Install from Pulse, and you don't see a license here. It's because you haven't assigned that license to the Pulse company and or that Pulse company is not mapped to the service provider console company, again, whose VBR server it belongs to. All right. So right here, we would click Install. That would replace any license that is already installed on that Veeam server. And of course, if there isn't a license, it would just install that license. Right. So that is how we create the license keys, assign them to a customer, push the license keys out to the customer. That's for Veeam Backup and Replication. I can do the same thing for Veeam One. I can also do this for Veeam Backup for 365, although keep in mind that Veeam Backup for 365 does support multi-tenancy. And this kind of brings us into the conversation about how you license Veeam agents. And I'll tell you what. For every customer who has their own Veeam Backup server, it is highly recommended that you create an individual license key for each customer. Back in the days, Veeam wanted you just to create one large key and use it on every Veeam server. We no longer recommend that. And if you want to go into auto reporting, which again, we'll talk about in a moment, it is a requirement that you have a separate license for every customer's Veeam Backup and Replication. However, let's look at Veeam Backup for 365 for a second. So let's say that you have three different customers and their 365 tenant are all being backed up by a single instance of Veeam Backup for 365. So if I were to go to the plugin library, Pulse, License Keys, New License, create a license for Veeam Backup for 365. And let's just say I went through all this, added the workloads. This would be for all the customers. So if there's 10 users for each customer and there's three customers, that would be 30 licenses or 30 instances for this license. And then what I would do is because this key is for multiple customers under my, as a service provider, 365 backup server, I would find that key and I would assign the key to my company. Because it doesn't make sense to assign it to a customer because I can only assign the key to one entry. And if there's multiple customers, then it just makes the most sense to assign the key to myself as a service provider. And then all the customers that are on that Veeam server can consume. Now, the reason that brings us into the Veeam Agents is because it works similarly. This is not, by the way, Veeam Agents that are managed by a customer's local backup server. In that scenario, it works the same way we just did. But let's say that you have some endpoints and they're all managed directly by the service provider console. So if you don't know, the service provider console can manage endpoints for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It can create the jobs, edit the jobs, centralize control. In that scenario, we're actually going to put a license on the service provider console. So here's what I would do. I would create a new license. The product that I'm going to select is the Veeam Agent. And for the workloads, let's say that I've got 10 servers and I've got 10 workstations. So next and finish, I'm going to assign this license to, you guessed it, my company. Because, again, let's say that I've got 20 different customers that are going to be consuming these 20 different agents' licenses. I'm not going to install individual licenses on each agent. Doing that will not allow you to do auto-reporting. As a matter of fact, it also won't auto-update. So you would have to put a new license on every single agent every time it expired, which is quite a hassle. So in this scenario, what I'm doing is I'm creating a master key for all of my agents. And I'm going to click the Go Back. I've assigned it to my company. Now, for this license, you will need to download the license. You can't push it out because we're trying to install it on the console itself. So what I would have done is I would have downloaded that license, go to Licensing, click on the Overview tab, and right here where it says License Status, valid 151 days, I can install the agent key right here for the total number of agents. So you'll see a total number of points. And then every agent backup policy that is being managed by the console will consume some of that license. You can see here in the Overview widget my current usage. I've got one workstation and two servers. And that's across all customers that are using the Veeam agents that are managed by the console, a.k.a. they don't have their own Veeam server. So to summarize, every customer should have an individual unique license on every Veeam backup server. However, if you have multi-tenanted scenarios, so Veeam backup for 365, you would need to create a single license, assign it to my company, as in you, the service provider, for the total number of users or workloads that are all added into that one server. Same thing for agents managed by the service provider console. It's one key on the service provider console to rule them all. Since we're here, let's start talking about usage reports and auto reporting. So the Usage Reports tab right here, I can see my usage for the month. That's going to be for the Veeam agent, customers who have their own Veeam backup, Veeam backup for 365. I don't have any Veeam One, but you would see that as well. Veeam backup for Azure, AWS, Google, those public cloud workloads. And then I would also have a breakdown of each customer and the different workloads that they are consuming. The Usage Report is very helpful if you need to go into Pulse each month and put in the number of workloads for each license type. And that's just a total, right, of Veeam backup and replication standard, Enterprise and Plus across all customers, Veeam agent, server and workstation, Veeam backup for 365 and so on. However, there are some streamlined processes that we can do to make this a little simpler. And that's auto reporting as well as auto populate, auto submit. So let's talk about that. I'm going to go back to the plugin library, Pulse, just to kind of take a shortcut to the Pulse portal. And of course, you can always go to the Pro Partner portal and go to Pulse directly. I'm just kind of, again, taking a little quick shortcut. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to manage my business. We're going to go to Pulse real quick. Let's log in here. And if I go to Pulse settings on the far right, you'll see these two options, auto populate, auto submit and auto reporting. Now, auto populate, auto submit. Just going to talk about it for a moment. I don't always recommend this. If you have a stagnant number of licenses used each month and they're hardly ever going to change, this might work for you. What this does is whatever licenses you cut, not use, but cut, you will be charged for. So you have to be careful because if you accidentally cut a key that you didn't mean to or too much quantity, you'll be billed for it regardless. And if a customer is removing workloads or adding workloads, you're going to have to constantly go in and edit these keys. However, by default, not using this, you are billed for whatever you use, really whatever you report. So Veeam can see all of the keys that you have cut. Those should be in line for what you are reporting. If there's a discrepancy, you know, there could be an audit. You could have to come in and modify your keys. And that's actually a part of the second topic, which is auto reporting. So what auto reporting does, this is going to look at your total usage, not what you've cut, but what all of your customers are actually consuming each month. Those numbers are going to be submitted to Pulse. But, well, let's say they're going to be reported to Pulse, but you are still going to have to click the submit to your aggregator. So all of the usage at the end of the month will automatically go into the service provider console and then into Pulse. You go into Pulse, make sure everything looks good, click the submit button, and that's all you've got to do. Now, in order for that to happen, there's a couple things that you need to do. One, you need to have those keys cut accurately. So if I click auto reporting, there's the process of asking to be on auto reporting. Right now, I'm already on it, so it's asking me to disable it. But if I want to enroll, it would say enroll into auto reporting. The Pulse team is going to look at what licenses you have versus what you're reporting. And if there's a large discrepancy or if you're using the same license on multiple Veeam servers, we're going to ask you to first have the individual license keys cut. And to get your license usage correct and remove any unused licenses. A couple other things you need to do. So let's go back to the Pulse integration from the console. And where the license keys are, you can see that I've got this automatic reporting turned on. So once you enroll in auto reporting, when you cut a key, this will be turned on and you will be able to cut your keys. Those will be submitted for you. And you just, again, have to go in each month. One additional thing that you want to have turned on is under licensing, usage report. And even if you're not doing auto reporting, I highly recommend that you turn this automatic report approval on. So what this does is every customer's Veeam backup and replication who has a rental license, on the first of the month, a message will appear on that Veeam server and say, hey, your license usage is ready to review. You can either click review or postpone. If you never go to that Veeam server, what happens is on the 10th, I believe, maybe a few days earlier, but it's definitely not on the first. Multiple days will pass. It will force close that and it will send it to the service provider console. So that's why you may not see some of your usage until the 4th, 5th, or even the 10th. And then you're going to be late on your usage. What turning this on does is that on the first of the month, it forces that automatically. So all of your usage will report to the console on the first and also all of your information will show up in Pulse for your auto reporting on the first. So turn this on, enroll in auto reporting, and then your usage will show up in Pulse. And all you have to do is click the submit button. And that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you next time. ♪
