I just about have my home network/lab infrastructure all in place so now turning my attention to how to backup everything before I start putting a ton of time into configuring all of the home services I have in mind like DVR, home automation and security, etc.
My lab consists of a 2 host VMware 6.5 HA cluster running on identical hardware (E5-2600) and third older gen host. The two primary hosts are running Starwinds VSAN and plans are for about 6 other (Sophos UTM, AD, DVR, etc) VMs each. The third host is running the witness nodes for vCenter HA and Starwinds along with a FreeNAS VM.
My high level plan is to use FreeNAS as the backup target for the main cluster and then back that up to a cloud provider. I am not set on using FreeNAS as my local backup target, but I do like the peace of mind ZFS gives in terms of reliability.
My question is what are the best options out there in the "free" category? I've done a bit of searching and researching and come up with the usual suspects: Veeam, Vembu, Unitrends, Altaro. So far, Veeam seems to be the best choice mainly due to not having VM limitations in the free version. GhettoVCB as well but since I am not using free ESXi I thought perhaps I could do better.
What is everyone else using in the no cost realm?
My lab consists of a 2 host VMware 6.5 HA cluster running on identical hardware (E5-2600) and third older gen host. The two primary hosts are running Starwinds VSAN and plans are for about 6 other (Sophos UTM, AD, DVR, etc) VMs each. The third host is running the witness nodes for vCenter HA and Starwinds along with a FreeNAS VM.
My high level plan is to use FreeNAS as the backup target for the main cluster and then back that up to a cloud provider. I am not set on using FreeNAS as my local backup target, but I do like the peace of mind ZFS gives in terms of reliability.
My question is what are the best options out there in the "free" category? I've done a bit of searching and researching and come up with the usual suspects: Veeam, Vembu, Unitrends, Altaro. So far, Veeam seems to be the best choice mainly due to not having VM limitations in the free version. GhettoVCB as well but since I am not using free ESXi I thought perhaps I could do better.
What is everyone else using in the no cost realm?