With this tool, you can backup VMware ESX Server Guest VMs to your local PC or directly from ESX host to ESX host. VMX also provides a SSH login to each server, compressed file transfer, and drag and drop file browsing. I hope you will read Backing up and managing VMware ESX virtual machines with VM Explorer.

This is a full-featured backup and recovery program for VMware ESX guest virtual machines. I saw a demo of it at VMworld 2008 and was very impressed. I plan to soon be beta-testing this be virtualization backup solution and expect to be giving you the full low-down on what it can do (as soon as VMware says that I can talk about it).

In the meantime, is what VMware says that vCenter Data Recovery will offer you:

Fast Backup and Recovery of Your Virtual Machines

• Disk-based backup and recovery to enable speedy restoration of your VMs
• Easy to deploy, since VMware vCenter Data Recovery is a virtual machine that runs on VMware ESX hosts
• Restore individual files or entire images as needed

Simple Configuration and Management of Backup Jobs

• The entire inventory of VMs are automatically identified through VMware vCenter Server
• Uses an intuitive wizard driven workflow to create, configure and schedule backup jobs
• Multiple restore points for each VM are displayed to easily select a specific point in time copy to restore
• Automatically monitors VMs that are moved by VMware HA, VMware VMotion and VMware DRS, so scheduled backups continue uninterrupted

Cost-Effective Backup Storage

• Maintain multiple point in time copies of VMs but only use a fraction of the storage
• De-duplication operation occurs as the VM backup is stored to disk to efficiently utilize the backup window and available resources