What are the cases where I will have to treat virtual machines as individual servers?

SUMMARY

What are the cases where I will have to treat virtual machines as individual servers?

ISSUE

In almost all cases, the socket license covers the virtual environment completely. It runs a backup at the host level and integrates with the backup infrastructure to ensure that the data of the virtual machines being backed up is crash and application consistent. Also with incremental forever backups that can be executed as often as every minute, the virtual machines can be protected often and comprehensively under the socket license. But there can be cases where some virtual machines may have to be treated as individual servers and the customers may want to purchase server licenses for select virtual machines. Some of them are noted here:

• is the beauty of our agent and agentless architecture. In environments where agentless architecture is prohibited due to infrastructure limitations, we can still protect that environment with our agent architecture.
• If you have a virtualized sql server and would desire to have additional control on the protection of the databases at a transaction log roll back level, then that server can be protected like a physical server with an installed agent.  Similar with a virtualized Exchange server.  Note that SQL and Exchange are well protected under the socket license, only when additional granular control over application protection is desired should the virtual machine be treated as a server and licensed separately.
• If you have a virtualized VMware environment where they are leveraging Raw Device Mapping (RDM) in physical compatibility mode, then the virtual machines have to be treated as a server and licensed accordingly.
• If you have a virtual machine, but want to not back up all the data on the virtual machine and desires to apply exclusions at the file / folder level. In this case, that virtual machine must be treated as a server and licensed separately.