So, how do you backup virtual servers? Traditionally, there have been two main schools of thought on this. One is to think of the virtual machine as a physical machine and install a backup agent on the VM. Then, just select what you need backed up just as you would a physical machine. There is nothing wrong with that school of thought, but what if you want to take it a step deeper and backup the actual virtual machine itself? That would be ideal for a disaster recovery situation since recovery time would be reduced. Some backup manufactures are taking advantage of Windows Volume Snapshot Service (VSS a.k.a. Shadow Copy) technology to accomplish this type of backup. Tim Jacobs recently expounded upon the details of this type of technology in a blog post. Tim does a good job of explaining VSS history and how this technology is being taken advantage of in the scenario of backing up virtual machines.

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