Home Vcenter Backup Solution

[BillHicksRIP]

Hi. Weighing up my options to back up my homelab so hoping for some suggestions. Currently have 3 ESXi 5.5 hosts and Vcenter running as a guest on one of them. There's about 20 VMs all using local storage of around 2TB - mainly Centos 5/6 and a couple of Windows 2012. I'd like to backup the ones I don't use a lot and have incremental backups of the always running ones in case of hardware failure.

I've got an unRAID server on a separate machine that has plenty of space which can provide NFS or a network share. Also have the option to run a VM or docker on it although memory is tight (Q9550 and 8GB). Are there any free options available to back the ESX hosts up? I see Veeam has brought out a backup client for Linux.

Any pointers appareciated.

 

[BillHicksRIP]

Thanks for the replies. I do want to backup the VMs rather than the hosts. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether I would need Vcenter up to do backups and restores or does Veeam talk directly to the VMs or go through the ESXi hosts?

Will look at that NFR lience too - thanks for the tip.