WWYD? - mix of licensed and unlicensed hosts

[pdub]

i have 3 remote offices incl hq plus the colo
running veeam in my colo'd datacenter on 3 licensed physical hosts, all configured, all is well, love my veeam, i replicate to hq
i place domain controllers (not primary) in each remote office for printing, dhcp, dns and directory services only
these remote dc's are vm windows servers running on freebie vsphere - unlicensed
i would prefer to back these servers up, and i would love to use veeam, but it makes no sense to license them imo
the recovery goal would be a full restore in the event of a loss, really don't need granular restore
how would you approach this?

i've thought maybe run the freebie veeam on some local computer within the remote office - but i'm concerned about reliability and security of a windows 7 desktop housing the backup
i've thought just use built in windows backup but my restore wouldn't be as great as it would with veeam

could i run freebie veeam on the dc itself and back itself up to the host's local datastore?

[nefes]

CJ, VMWare API is restricted on free ESX(i), so there is no possibility for Veeam to back up VMs from such hosts - no matter what Veeam edition you use and where it is set up.

However, Free Hyper-V have no such limitation - maybe this could help you.

[pdub]

thank you for the info nefes!