Protecting Application Data on Virtual Machines

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

When you add a virtual machine to a protection group, you are protecting the complete configuration of the virtual machine, including operating system, applications, and application data. However, you cannot specifically recover application data from the recovery points for the virtual machine; you can only recover the entire virtual machine. When you recover the virtual machine, applications are recovered with all data that was present at the time that the recovery point was created.

It is not necessary to install a DPM protection agent on a virtual machine to protect it as a virtual machine on the Virtual Server host.

To recover only application data for applications running in virtual machines, you must install a protection agent on the virtual machine and select the application data explicitly as a protection group member.

You can protect both the virtual machines as guests on the Virtual Server host and the application data within the virtual machines as applications.

For more information about protecting application data, see the topics on protecting specific data types, such as Exchange Server data or SQL Server data, in DPM Help (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102087).