Few months ago Acronis announced its last bare-metal backup solution, TrueImage 9.1, with a new feature called Universal Restore, able to serve as P2V migration tool when restoring an image inside a virtual machine.
Now Symantec announces some notable changes in its well known LiveState backup solution, including a new add-on module called Restore Anywhere, clear answer to Acronis Universal Restore:
Symantec Corp. today introduced Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery , which incorporates functionality from Symantec LiveState Recovery with new, simplified deployment, delivering comprehensive, disk-based Windows system protection. As a stand alone solution, Backup Exec System Recovery complements Backup Exec for Windows Servers, which is optimized for data protection.
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Flexibility is also enhanced by allowing administrators to perform system restorations even if there is no hardware available by restoring recovery points to virtual environments in VMware (P2V). When new hardware is available, or existing hardware is repaired, the servers can easily be restored from a virtual machine back to a physical machine without impacting business continuity (V2P)…
I expect Microsoft to announce something similar even without launching a new product, since a backup feature, CompletePC Backup, recently introduced in upcoming Windows Vista saves the physical computer image in .vhd format (used by Virtual Server 2005 to store virtual machines).