Virtualised Sharepoint Backup Strategies

I have a Sharepoint (OSS 2007) farm running on three virtual machines in VMWare ESX, plus a SQL Server backend on physical hardware. During a recent Business Continuity Planning event I tried restoring the sharepoint farm with only the config and content databases, and failed to get things working.

My plan was to build a new sharepoint server, then attach this to a restoration config database and install the Central Management site on this server, then reattach the content databases. This failed at the Central Management part of the plan. So I am back to the drawing board on the best strategy for backup and recovery, with reducing the time and complexity of the restore job the main objective.

I haven't been able to find much in the way of discussion of backup/restore strategies for Sharepoint in a VMWare environment, so I figured I'd see if anyone on server fault has any ideas or experience.

From serverfault dunxd

• We use vRanger Pro (vRanger Pro Site). It's for pay, but it's quite nice. Does incremental backups of your entire VMs without downtime and will handle clusters as well as individual machines.

  Chris Thorpe : As will Veeam Backup & Replication, and Backup Exec 2010 http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html http://www.symantec.com/business/products/family.jsp?familyid=backupexec
  From Jonathan DeMarks