One aspect where Microsoft is extremely weak in the virtualization realm is the VMs backup and restore.
The market doesn’t offer many choices to Hyper-V customers and even the Microsoft own enterprise disaster recovery solution, System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2007, leaves much to desire.
Things are slowly changing. In part because existing partners like NetApp are more committed to release products that support Hyper-V now that Microsoft is gaining some concrete market share.
In part because the VMware strategy is pushing even its most loyal partners into Microsoft’s arms.
In part because Microsoft is working on a better integration between Hyper-V and most of its other products.
Data Protection Manager 2010, which is about to reach the Release Candidate status, is part of this ongoing effort.
virtualization.info already reported that the product will finally allow to protect virtual machines inside the Windows Server 2008 Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs).
Given this new capability, it’s highly desirable to automatically protect new virtual machines that are stored in a cluster.
Microsoft gives guidance on how to manipulate DPM 2010 with PowerShell scripts to do so.