Virtual Machine Backup-and-Recovery Conundrum

Continue to my earlier posts on virtulaization,

For the ones who are interested in Virtualaization in IT:

Server virtualization has crossed the proverbial chasm. Not long ago, when deploying new servers, one had to justify making them virtual, rather than physical. Now, the opposite is becoming true. IT managers in many organizations have decreed "virtual first" policies, requiring new server deployments to be virtual unless there is specific justification for a physical server.

Alas, for all its goodness, virtualization creates a number of new storage and data management issues. One big problem area is backup. While backup techniques from the physical server world can be used in a virtual machine (VM) environment, they don't work very well.

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