I have seen a consistent growth lately in the number of my customers that shift to using vSphere Data Protection (VDP). I guess with VDP standard edition being a freebie nonetheless all the powerful features it come up with has made it an easy choice for many customers in the SMB market. VDP standard comes loaded with many features including: (Find out more about each of these features at: http://www.vmware.com/ca/en/products/vsphere/features/data-protection.html )

• Variable-length de-duplication
• Global de-duplication
• Changed Block Tracking backup (CBT)
• Changed Block Tracking restore
• One-step recovery

Though as with every free thing in life it comes with few limitations, where most of them are waived when upgrading to the paid version called VDP Advanced. Below is the main limits of the free VDP Standard Edition:

• Each VDP appliance supports backup for up to 100 virtual machines..
• Support a maximum of 2 TB of deduplicated backup data.
• Each vCenter Server can support up to 10 VDP appliances.

Upgrading to the vSphere Data Protection Advanced Edition waive most of these limits as below:

• Each VDP Advanced supports backup for up to 4,000 VMs in comparison to only 100 in the Standard Edition
• vSphere Data Protection Advanced expand the maximum supported deduplicated backup datastore to 8TB from 2TB in the standard edition
• vSphere Data Protection Advanced still limited to 10 VDP appliances per vCenter.
• In addition the VDP Advanced Edition provide Business Critical APPs(Exchange, SQL, & SharePoint) Agents to deliver application-consistent backup and granular recovery.

As many customers who has started with VDP Standard has liked the product, but ran out over its limit they end up purchasing the VDP advanced Edition to benefits of the extra features provided by the advanced edition. One thing I have always been asked after the upgrade is how to license the hosts to be backed up by VDP Advanced. As many customers deploy the VDP Advanced Appliance with easy, they just rush to test it to backup some VMs to be welcome with “Not Licensed” error as per the below screenshot:

Unfortunately, in this case the option to license hosts in VDP is not in a very obvious location under the configuration tab . The below screenshot demonstrate where you can find and configure hosts licenses in VDP.

As you can see in the above screen shot to license your hosts for VDP usage you will have to go to Configuration => Backup Appliance => VDP Advanced License Assignment => Edit license assignment.

Hope this post helped saving you sometime in figuring out how to use your vSphere Data ProtectionAdvanced License.