Message "No valid subscriptions"

[Franky779]

Hi Proxmox Users,

yesterday i installed the new datacenter manager. Its working fine so far but i see the following message at the update page from pdm:



We are running 2 clusters (each 3 nodes) and one backup server with a valid enterprise subscription.

PDM Dashboard says:



Did i set up anything wrong when adding my servers?

 

[fba]

This might refer to the amount of subscriptions you have. It is below 80% of all your servers, see https://pdm.proxmox.com/docs/faq.ht...xmox-datacenter-manager-enterprise-repository
Might be a bug though in your case.

 

[Franky779]

But all servers should be 100%!? We don´t have a single node without a license. Strange

• 1 x Proxmox Backup Server Community Subscription 1 year
• 3 x Proxmox VE Standard Subscription 2 CPUs/year

Probably the pmxb Community Edition is -25%

 

[Johannes S]

Probably the pmxb Community Edition is -25%

Exactly since the 80% means at least basic subscription. So you would need to:
- Live with the nag screen
- Pay for a basic subscription of PBS
- Don't maintain PBS from the PDM.

Imho a combination of basic subscription and removing PBS from the PDM is your best course of action. First you might run into issues where you also might want professional support for the Backup Server. Second since with the PDM you can access all your instances I wouldn't feel comfortable that an bad actor who managed to take over the PDM might also get access to your backups. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Franky779]

True. I will consider that. Thanks

 

[JD2002]

I'm seeing the same. I'm going to leave PDM and Proxmox in general alone for a few weeks. Lot of stuff breaking that shouldn't be with new updates and releases. QA process change perhaps. Anyway, PDM can sit and idle until the bugs are sorted.

 

[ltctech]

We have a mix of Standard and Community licensed PVE based on criticality. Requiring Basic for enterprise repo access for PDM while PVE has enterprise repo access with a Community license is a bit idiosyncratic.

I guess we're going to run with pdm-no-subscription for now.

 

[Johannes S]

Anyway, PDM can sit and idle until the bugs are sorted.

The nag screen is not a bug but working as designed

 

[omid1979]

Is it possible to disable Proxmox Subscription warning on dashboard ?
for example I have Proxmox CE without subscription , and don't want to see alert for subscription on main page of dashboard ,

 

[Neobin]

Is it possible to disable Proxmox Subscription warning on dashboard ?
for example I have Proxmox CE without subscription , and don't want to see alert for subscription on main page of dashboard ,

Other than getting and activating a subscription, no.

Edit:
For completeness:

Post in thread 'you do not have a valid subscription for this server'

Jun 20, 2023

This is free and open software, you can patch the source to your liking.

Having said that, any such modification is not supported and you are on your own, I would advice against it.

• Maximiliano

 

[Neobin]

We are running 2 clusters (each 3 nodes) and one backup server with a valid enterprise subscription.

But all servers should be 100%!? We don´t have a single node without a license. Strange

• 1 x Proxmox Backup Server Community Subscription 1 year
• 3 x Proxmox VE Standard Subscription 2 CPUs/year

Probably the pmxb Community Edition is -25%

What do you actually have? 6 PVEs and 1 PBS or 3 PVEs and 1 PBS?
At least from the screenshot it looks like you only added one of the clusters (with 3 PVEs) to that PDM, no?

 

[JD2002]

The nag screen is not a bug but working as designed

The age old question of how to monetize opensource. I'm hardly a newbie to it. Does feel a bit of a kick-in-the-teeth to the folks who purchased community licenses in support of the project and spent considerable amounts of time testing PDM however. "It's just a nag screen". True enough -- but is also a repetitive dose of salt in the wound of anyone who would be an influencer or tester for enterprise deployments. For example - as a home-lab sysadmin who got kicked up into management years ago, I happen to be a bit of both. Something that should be considered when deciding where to draw the line.

 

[Franky779]

What do you actually have? 6 PVEs and 1 PBS or 3 PVEs and 1 PBS?
At least from the screenshot it looks like you only added one of the clusters (with 3 PVEs) to that PDM, no?

Actually i added 1 of 2 clusters for testing pdm

In total we have 2 clusters with each 3 nodes + 1pbs

 

[Johannes S]

The age old question of how to monetize opensource. I'm hardly a newbie to it. Does feel a bit of a kick-in-the-teeth to the folks who purchased community licenses in support of the project and spent considerable amounts of time testing PDM however. "It's just a nag screen". True enough -- but is also a repetitive dose of salt in the wound of anyone who would be an influencer or tester for enterprise deployments. For example - as a home-lab sysadmin who got kicked up into management years ago, I happen to be a bit of both. Something that should be considered when deciding where to draw the line.

Well you could also think that it's bargain for enterprise environments that it's enough to have a support subscription for all your PBS and PVE nodes to have PDM without the nag and access to the enterprise repo instead of having to pay for PDM too.

To get some perspective here are two quotes from a Proxmox developer (I suspect @t.lamprecht ) on a hackernews thread from 2024 (so before PDM was available) :

In short, we're targeting enterprise users with a mix of a (soft) stick (e.g. pop-up to note that one isn't having the most production ready experience) a carrot (way better tested updates and depending on the level also enterprise support). Homelab users aren't in the target of our subscription services at all, and if we'd target them with cheap prices that would be just misused by companies too, we know this for a fact because the project is over 15 years old, and there was a lot tried out before getting to the current design. And while there might some protection mechanisms we could set up, we rather avoid DRM'ifying Proxmox projects and avoid wasting time playing cat-and-mouse games with entities trying to abuse this.

Note though, that we still cater to the homelab in other ways even if it isn't our main target audience, like being very active on our community forums for all users, or simple having 100% FLOSS software, no open-core or other, in my opinion rather questionable, open source models. And the price of a pop-up or using the still very stable no-subscription repository is IMO also quite small compared to the feature on gets 100% for free.

If one wants to contribute to our project but either cannot, or does not want, to afford a subscription, then I think helping out in the communities, submitting elaborate bug reports and thought out feature requests, spreading gospel at the companies they work with/for is not only cheaper for them, but also much more worth for the project.

> I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.
I worded that part a bit oddly (sorry, not a native speaker), I meant that one already gets all features, as we don't do any feature gating or the like. I.e., you can use all features of the software with or without subscription, the latter only provides extra services.

> Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away.

Actually the "stick" part of the carrots and stick design is just as important for enterprise users, as surprisingly a significant amount of enterprise user do not care of not getting any software updates ("it's enterprise, it just needs to magically work, even for new unforeseen events!11!!1"), and the subscriptions and enterprise repo existed before the nag, I cannot share all details, but you will have to believe me that it made a big difference. It also showed that a lot of companies are willing to pay for projects supporting their infrastructure, but they need to be made aware of the possibility quite actively.

But yeah, I can understand the opinions of the home lab community here, but I also hope that I could convey that the current system was carefully optimized over many years for our business case, and that means, that it can pay a (nowadays not so small amount of) developers salaries to extend, maintain and support the growing amounts of Proxmox projects.

If anybody that stumbles over this still does not believe in the necessity of the system, or know how it will be better if we do XYZ (how, if you have zero insights in our data and obviously do not run your own company doing this?), I just have to be blunt and recommend just using an alternative, for PVE et al. the single nag on login is the price you pay to get a full-blown cluster & hyper-visor stack.

> or maybe a one-time license purchase

I feel already like some FLOSS evangelist, but that's something I just have to correct: we sell no licenses at all, our projects are, and will stay, AGPLv3 licensed. And w.r.t. the same question for a life-time subscription with a one-time fee, not planned, reasons: see above.

btw. thanks for the discussion, most often I read this more in the demanding voice, which is hard to stay polite when responding – that wasn't the case at all here.

For the complete discussion see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39650877

 

[deimosian]

We had a meeting about this after realizing this limitation. Our CIO's take was essentially that Proxmox is now falsely advertising the Community Subscription since it clearly says it includes Enterprise Repository access.

Managing all our clusters, only the main production one of which has higher level licenses, with a non-production Datacenter Manager with a ton of warnings is not going to happen. Neither is upgrading dozens of Community subscriptions just for this.

A key quote from the meeting: "Who the @#$% do they think they are, Broadcom?"

 

[t.lamprecht]

Now saw that you cross-posted this in various threads, see my reply here and please stop doing such spam-like mass replies.

Post in thread 'Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 (stable)'

Thursday at 06:42

Community subscriptions were advertised with enterprise repository access and denying it now is an abhorrent bait and switch.

That makes zero sense. The PVE Community subscription is for the PVE enterprise repo, not for the PDM one, just like it is not for the PBS one.
So absolutely nothing changed for existing PVE installations, besides you now being able to now also use PDM in addition, i.e. a new product that's again 100% open source too.

We certainly never promised that a PVE specific subscription will give you the included services also for future new products, so...

• t.lamprecht

• 

 

[deimosian]

Now saw that you cross-posted this in various threads, see my reply here and please stop doing such spam-like mass replies.

Post in thread 'Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 (stable)'

Thursday at 06:42

Community subscriptions were advertised with enterprise repository access and denying it now is an abhorrent bait and switch.

That makes zero sense. The PVE Community subscription is for the PVE enterprise repo, not for the PDM one, just like it is not for the PBS one.
So absolutely nothing changed for existing PVE installations, besides you now being able to now also use PDM in addition, i.e. a new product that's again 100% open source too.

We certainly never promised that a PVE specific subscription will give you the included services also for future new products, so...

• t.lamprecht

• 

Your reply there did not actually address the issues at all, you're just being defensively dismissive.

You're asking people to mix production ready PVE and non-production PDM just because they didn't buy a high enough % of higher tier subscriptions. That has turned a value add into an insult to people who actually paid (and paid a lot) for your free product instead of just running no-sub and anti-nag.

You also don't provide any sane upgrade path. What I am supposed to do, just buy a ton of new basic subscriptions now and let all the remaining paid time on the dozens of community subscription just go to waste?

How do I explain that to my boss who I convinced to buy these and migrate from VMware?

P.S. Replying in 3 on-topic threads is not "spam-like", if you want it all in one place merge the threads for the issue.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Your reply there did not actually address the issues at all, you're just being defensively dismissive.

I did not dismiss anything, I just try to understand your odd accusations, given that nothing changed for your existing PVE subscriptions.
You still get exactly the same value of our lowest subscription tier you choose to pay for, nothing more, but certainly not anything less.

You're asking people to mix production ready PVE and non-production PDM just because they didn't buy a high enough % of higher tier subscriptions.

No we don't. We released a new product targeting enterprise setups that require having 80% of linked remotes using our second-lowest tier subscription, i.e. the one fully targeting enterprise setups due to included enterprise support.

And PVE and PDM are installed on different systems, at least that's the recommendation, there is no real mix of enterprise or no-subscription on the same system. And as PDM targets supporting remotes having the same major releases with full feature compatibility, and one major release before and one after with being compatible with all feature overlap, there's certainly not the case that anything will break in that regard, as that every remote and PDM is in-sync on available updates in realtime is certainly not the case in any way.

That has turned a value add into an insult to people who actually paid (and paid a lot) for your free product instead of just running no-sub and anti-nag.

This makes it hard to not be dismissive, it's simply bad-faith as you still argue as you have lost value for your subscription purchase due to the new existence of PDM, which is simply not the case.

You also don't provide any sane upgrade path. What I am supposed to do, just buy a ton of new basic subscriptions now and let all the remaining paid time on the dozens of community subscription just go to waste?

Our shop team certainly can assist you here with a sane upgrade path, they handle key upgrades all the time.

How do I explain that to my boss who I convinced to buy these and migrate from VMware?

I'd start with that you got another project to be used for free that previously did not exist as stable version. If they think using that product is business relevant for you, and having enterprise repository and support access for that is too, then see the reply above, otherwise you can basically pretend PDM does not exist, as again, nothing changed for the worse for you.

 

[Johannes S]

How do I explain that to my boss who I convinced to buy these and migrate from VMware?

What would you pay for vmware compared to a basic subscription?
People who already have at least basic subscription get the PDM for free. How would you react if the PDM would need another subscription like ProxmoxBackupServer?

 

[EllerholdAG]

How do I explain that to my boss who I convinced to buy these and migrate from VMware?

You can keep your existing community licenses which nets you everything you paid for (PVE & possibily PBS)
OR you can upgrade your community licenses to basic in order to get a new product (PDM).
OR you can go back to vmware and pay 20x.