I was already using the free Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to make a backup of my personal computer to a share on a server running Windows Server. But I didn’t make a backup of my ESXi server running several VMs for my lab environment.

When I downloaded the latest version of the Veeam Agent for Windows, I noticed the following on the download page.

The Community Edition… Hmm… I downloaded the software on the Windows server that was my original backup target and ran the installer. The installation is very straight forward and any prerequisites that are missing are automatically installed.

If you want more information about the Community Edition there is a Downloading and Installing Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition video and you can always visit the Veaam Help Center.

After the installation, I could simply repoint my backup job from a Windows share to the Veeam Backup Repository and the next morning the backup was completed successfully.

The next step was to connect my ESXi server to Veeam Backup and Replication. I’m not going to give you a step by step guide on how to do this because Veeam has a very informative Quick Start Guide video: Backup & Replication Community Edition – Quick Start Guide

But in a nutshell:

• Add the ESXi server to the Backup Infrastructure
• Create a Virtual Machine backup job

So now I can backup my virtual machines for free!