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So, I have an Unitrends appliance for my main VMware cluster. Works great. Setup Veeam at a sister company and was also impressed.

I’m setting up a remote office with a single ESXi 5.5 Essentials host (1 proc), which will have a single 2008 Server VM and a couple Windows 7 VMs.

I’d want to backup the VM daily to a NAS device or a desktop computer in the office. Would like capabilities of restoring the VM and run it on a desktop computer temporarily in the event the host crashed. This is an all in one server (Domain Controller, DHCP, file server). Main thing it will have is file shares and Sage BusinessWorks (GL).

Fastest Internet I can get at the time is 5M/5M.

I’ll offsite my critical stuff over the WAN nightly via scheduled tasks to copy a zip file over VPN, which is less than 500MB.

I don’t have much time these days (who does?), so reaching out to the community to quickly help me identify a solution. Going to fly out next week to get this setup.

I’ve played with Veeam before but would like something free if it will work. Any free versions out there worth looking at?

How does the free SpiceWorks Unitrends work? Does it run in a VM? Is this worth considering?

Thanks :slight_smile:

@VMware

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You could use Veeam Endpoint Backup for this (or at least test it). You install the client on your VMs and schedule the backups to the storage of your choice (retaining a specified number of restore points as you desire). Setting the software up on a scheduled backup is super simple, but I have not yet tested a restore. You might want to do that to make sure you can do the restore properly. The downside is you are managing each VM with the client installed and scheduling each one individually.

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Unitrends if I remember right is a virtual appliance, and I am not certain off hand what the storage requirements are on your host to use it. But I was thinking it will backup to NAS out of the box without any trouble, and the great thing about it would be that you can schedule backups of all VMs and manage them from a single pane of glass.

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The free Unitrends Enterprise Backup runs in a VM and can use NAS as a backup target.

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Unitrends free edition will work. You can backup to a NAS via CIFS(SMB) or via NFS. You can also use iscsi.

http://go.unitrends.com/unitrends-spiceworks-edition

http://go.unitrends.com/unitrends-and-free-esxi

@katie

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Eric - Thanks for using Unitrends! The free Spiceworks edition of UEB should meet your needs, as it will protect up to 8 VMs for free forever. As others have said, it’s a virtual appliance, so you’ll need the minimum requirements in your remote office for it to work properly. Please let me know what other questions you may have about this version.

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Eric- Veeam has a free edition you can use. Veeam Backup Free Edition has thirteen features including restore scenarios for AD, Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL. Give it a try: http://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Additionally we have a Spiceworks NFR, although, it only covers up to 2 CPU sockets for VMware and Hyper-V.

For Desktop & Laptops, we have Veeam Endpoint Free: http://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html

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Use Veeam for sure. All my customers use it. They love it. Pony up the money for it. It now comes with cloud included.