Today's data centers are in the midst of a massive revolution originating from the move to virtual server architectures powered by solutions such as VMware. Such growth is easy to understand. The benefits of server consolidation via virtualization can be significant:

• Dramatic savings in power/cooling costs and data center floor space
• Cost savings from reuse and extension of existing assets
• Simplified application management, rapid resource provisioning and the ability to achieve new levels of application availability and portability

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 eliminate 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.