Backup Strategy / Licensing

Thanks in advance for any feedback. I’ve reached out several times to people on here and your expertise has been a great help. I’m solo IT at my company so no one to bounce ideas off of. I never try to ask before looking into things myself, so I read a lot about a subject before asking questions. Sometimes it’s just nice to know how someone else would approach something. So here goes….

We have two identical servers, each at different physical locations. Servers are running Windows Server 2022 Std with 1 VM each. I’d like to backup the VM’s, and the best thing I’ve found is Veeam, however, I know you it’s recommended to install it on a server by itself. Server 2022 also licenses 2 VM’s, so technically each server has room for 1 more VM (and yes it has the hardware capacity to support 2). This server is idle after 6pm until 5am, so could easily run another VM to do backups and not impact production.

We don’t have a 3rd server (and don’t have budget for any more this year) so my only options are to install Veeam on one or both of the hosts (cant imagine that’s a good idea), or install it as a separate VM on one or both of the servers. If I max out at 2 VM’s each, then if I had to failover, I would technically be at 3 VM’s on one of the servers, so wouldn’t be licensed properly.

Any ideas on what options I have or anything else I could do to back up my VM’s?