Jobs fail with "The host is not licensed for this feature" error message after upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication Update 4

Challenge

After updating Veeam to 9.5 Update 4, backups of VMs begin to fail with the error: VDDK error: 16064 (The host is not licensed for this feature).

Cause

Due to a limitation in the VDDK library for VDDK 5.5.5, ESXi hosts on version 5.0 or 5.1 which are licensed with the VMware Essentials License do not have sufficient rights for common backup procedures in the VMware environment.

Solution

Veeam is currently in the process of developing a hotfix for this issue. As a workaround, if it is possible to apply an Evaluation License on the hosts, this will allow backups to resume until a hotfix is developed to resolve the issue.