For years now we've had the tools necessary to back up virtual machines as a single unit. Image-level backups meant that all the millions of little files that make up a server could get backed up all at once as a single file (VMDK for VMware or VHD for Microsoft and Citrix).

This was a great solution that promised to solve all our disaster recovery and business continuity problems ... at least until we started trying the processes on SQL, Exchange, and Domain Controller servers. You see, with traditional image-level backups, any on-board transactional databases didn't get quiesced as part of the backup. The result of this was that a restored virtual machine usually ended up with a database in an inconsistent state. ESEUTIL, here we come!

No longer. In my MCPmag.com quickTIP column this week, I talk about VizionCore's new vRanger & vReplicator products. These products now have the built-in ability to reach into the virtual machine and quiet down any databases to ensure that they'll come back alive and in one piece. This is the holy grail of virtualization backups and a boon to disaster recovery.

From the piece:

"I recently discovered that VizionCore's vRanger Pro v3.2 includes support for directly communicating with a Windows virtual machine's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This communication allows the backup engine to instruct the database to pause at the correct point in the backup so that the database will not return from a restore in an inconsistent state."

Read the full piece at: http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=2587