My friend let me use one of his older, unused servers in his data center so I have a place to run some virtual machines for my automation projects. As you may expect there is no SLA for this server, no redundancy, limited storage. For me, it is still better to have lab running 24/7 there than using my desktop PC or pay for resources in the public cloud. The server is running ESXi 6.0 hypervisor and have a free license installed. 

The latest release of new VMware modules for Ansible was a trigger to develop a playbook that will let me back up the virtual machine from the datastore on a remote server to my home storage. Quite simple and straightforward idea lead to some unexpected problems and questions – Where should be the limit of features available in free licenses? Should automation be blocked, or at least some tasks, in free features?