Generally you license the number of drives in the library that will be participating in Vaulting operations.

 

The Base License gives you the Vault functionality plus 4 drives that can be used for vaulting purposes (in-line tape duplication, ejection, multiple catalog backups, etc.)

Each additional drive requires an additional Vault Tape Drive license.

 

The Unlimited License is just that, unlimited Vault Drives (but not Library-based Robotic Drives – you still need to license those separately).

 

Here are some examples on how I believe this works (I’m still setting this up myself since my company just purchased Vault):

 

If you had a single site, with a single library that has 4 drives in it. All you need is the Base License and you’re done. Those 4 drives can be used for backup/restore functions and vault functions.

 

If you had two sites, each with a library that had 2 drives in it. All you need is the base license since 2 drives in one site are handled by half the base license and the other 2 drives are handled by the other half.

 

If you had multiple sites, each with multiple libraries, you could purchase the base license, then additional drive licenses to cover those drives that would get used for vault. So in my case, I have the base license + 2 additional drive licenses for one site, 2 more drive licenses for another site and 2 more for yet another site. This is independent of the robotic drive licenses which is 6 for one site, 4 for another (2 libraries) and 4 for another (2 libraries).

 

Your best bet if you are still confused would be to talk to a Symantec Sales Rep. and they can walk you through what you would need licensing wise… but I think it’s pretty straightforward once you understand that the base gives you 4 drives to use, and then you purchase additional drives beyond that.