Managing licenses

Acronis Cyber Frame comes with a trial license that allows you to evaluate its features. The trial license has no expiration date but limits the logical storage capacity to 1 TB.

The Acronis Cyber Frame licensing model requires registration of the installation in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. License management is performed through Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, which issues and manages licenses for registered clusters.

If the cluster is registered in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, the new Acronis Cyber Frame licensing model is applied. If the cluster is not registered, the legacy Acronis Cyber Infrastructure licensing model continues to be used.

Compared to Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, where only logical storage was charged, Acronis Cyber Frame introduces a resource-based licensing model. Chargeable resources may include compute resources, storage (including S3-compatible object storage), and other services depending on the deployment configuration. Unregistered clusters continue to use the legacy model, where only logical storage is charged.

Acronis Backup Gateway usage is excluded from billing and is not counted as part of licensed resource consumption in both licensing models.

Licensing after registration

During cloud registration:

If the cluster has no active license, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud automatically issues and activates a new Acronis Cyber Frame license for the cluster.
If the cluster has an active license key or SPLA for Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, it is replaced with a new license for Acronis Cyber Frame.

After the cluster is registered, licensing operates under a pay-as-you-go model. This model does not impose predefined resource limits, and usage is billed based on actual resource consumption.

With this model, Acronis Cyber Frame periodically sends usage reports to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. These reports are used for license validation and usage-based billing. If the cluster cannot access the Acronis datacenter that was used during cloud registration, the license enters a 30-day grace period. If connectivity is not restored during this period, the license expires.

Licensing without registration (legacy model)

The legacy licensing model supports the following license types:

Services provider license agreement (SPLA). The SPLA implements a pay-as-you-go model: it grants unlimited storage capacity and customers are charged for their actual usage of these resources. With an SPLA, Acronis Cyber Frame automatically sends reports to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud once every four hours. The license is displayed with the expiration date of two weeks, which counts from the last sent report and is prolonged after each report. If no reports have been received for two weeks, the license expires. For reports to reach their destination, the cluster must be able to access the Acronis datacenter that has been used to enable the SPLA. Make sure that TCP port 443 is open.
License key. Implementing the provisioning model, keys are time-limited (subscription) and grant a certain storage capacity. If a commercial license is already installed, a key augments its expiration date or storage limit.

License enforcement

When a license expires, all write operations to the storage cluster stop until a valid license is installed.

When upgrading from Acronis Cyber Infrastructure:

The existing entitlement is temporarily reused until the current license expires.
Compute and storage functionality remain available during this period.
Before the Acronis Cyber Infrastructure license expires, the installation must be registered in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud and licensed under the Acronis Cyber Frame model.

If the installation is not registered before the Acronis Cyber Infrastructure license expires:

Running workloads continue to operate.
Provisioning of new resources is restricted until licensing is resolved.

After registration and successful license synchronization, usage reporting under the legacy model stops permanently and billing is performed according to the new pricing model.

To learn more about Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud licensing, refer to the Partner Administrator Guide.

Limitations

Block storage space used by iSCSI LUNs and compute volumes is not fully thin provisioned. After user data removal, unused storage space is not reclaimed and is reported as actual used space, which is charged according to your licensing model. For more details, refer to Logical space chart.

Prerequisites

The storage cluster is created by following the instructions in Deploying the storage cluster.