A dizzying range of technology choices awaits IT organizations trying to master the art of data protection for virtual server environments. Those choices range from whether to use familiar technologies, something new, or a combination thereof in order to effectively meet the needs of the organization. Based on Datalink's insights gained from our experience protecting enterprise data centers, this white paper provides practical advice and considerations surrounding backup and recovery of virtual server infrastructures. We offer a glimpse at new data protection techniques and approaches that can help unlock the ultimate potential of an organization's optimized virtual environment. We also provide details on how offloading much of the work from the virtualized application infrastructure can help you avoid many virtual server backup and recovery challenges. Given the current prevalence of VMware in many installations, this paper focuses primarily on backup and recovery considerations in VMware environments.