Macrium reflect free edition limitations
I doubt you'll find many (or any) good free imaging options in the server realm, but especially if you're backing up VMs as well, given the purpose that Reflect serves, the cost of a Server license seems fairly insignificant, even for a school budget. Windows Server Backup is of course one free, VSS-aware system image tool, but it has a long list of downsides that I believe I listed somewhere on this forum a while ago. For example, without going to a great deal of effort, you would basically be limited to rolling back the VM in its entirety rather than being able to extract individual files/folders from VM backups, and if you're using snapshots and differencing disks, even rolling back the VM by restoring the individual VM files extracted from the host server's backups has its challenges. Free backup, disk imaging and cloning solution for commercial and personal use. If you only have VM backups courtesy of host backups, you limit and complicate your restore options.
#Macrium reflect free edition limitations software
But even then, depending on what the VMs do, you should seriously consider having backup software within the VMs themselves, even if it's only backing up individual files/folders/databases rather than the entire OS. Note however that even if you found a free imaging solution that ran on Windows Server, if you're running VMs, you'd definitely want the backup solution to be VSS-aware in order to capture the VMs in a usable state. All editions of Macrium Reflect recognize GPT disks. If there is an asterisk in the dyn column, then the Standard edition will not recognize the listed disk. To establish if this is the case, in a command window, type.
Only Reflect Server runs on Windows Server OSes. Only Macrium Reflect Professional and Server editions support dynamic disks.