So I will look at and compare two other products: Thinware vBackup and Trilead VM Explorer. But its current version does no longer work with free ESXi, because Veeam now focuses on the modern features (VADP and CBT) mentioned above that are not available with the free license. its former standalone version VeeamZip) was the de-facto standard for backing up VMs on free ESXi. In the past Veeam's free edition of their flagship product Backup & Replication (resp. GhettoVCB does not offer that, so let's look at alternatives that run on the most wanted and most hated operating system: Windows. I could stop now and ignore the voices of all the admins out there that want simple-to-use GUI tools to do their tasks - one graphical interface to create and manage backup jobs, maintain VM and backup inventories etc. GhettoVCB is available on Github, it's well documentedĀ andĀ has great community support. It is a script that runs inside an ESXi shell and is able to utilize VMware snapshots to back up even running VMs by cloning them to a secondary location (e.g. The first option that I must mention here is William Lam's awesome GhettoVCB script.
Vmware free version personal use for free#
And best of all these are available for free themselves. Nevertheless there are several solutions available to back up VMs running on free ESXi. but unfortunately with the free ESXi license VMware has disabled some functionality that is important for efficient backups of VMs: VADP ( vStorage APIs for Data Protection) and CBT ( Changed Block Tracking) are the features that all modern software products for VM backups make use of.
As soon as you have some sort of "production" workload running in VMs you will start thinking about how to protect them from data loss.
VMware ESXi with the free license (also known as vSphere Hypervisor) is a great way to get started with server virtualization and run your own hypervisor at home or in small environments.