For those of you with VMware vSphere Essential Plus and higher you may be aware of the in built capability of Data Recovery, a feature of vSphere that VMware to be honest has not done a great job of marketing the value of.
Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest Operating Systems in ESX and ESXi.
Architecturally it looks like this:
In late November 2009 the company updated it to version 1.1 (build 207380) primarily to introduce support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.
VDR 1.1 also introduces a new File Level Restore (FLR) client for Windows guests which finally allows to restore single files:
If you haven’t already looked at this – take a look.