System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is slowly approaching the RTM launch, and hits today the release candidate status. This means that users adopting Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 will soon be able to perform live backup of their virtual machines, as known since this March.
In details SCDPM will be able to perform virtual machines backup acting at host-level, live if the VM contains a Windows Server 2003 guest OS, offline if it contains any other operating system.
SCDPM 2007 will be the only Microsoft product able to perform such operation since the company disallowed the use of free NTBackup for the task.
Enroll for the beta program here, and watch a video about this capability here.