One of the great features in Data Protection Manager is the ability to protect virtual machines without having to install agents, this will though HyperV and VSS create a backup of the virtual machine.

This is one of the many “smaller” features that completes the systemcenter suite of products , Hyper V and Virtual Machine Manager enables flexible automates virtulization and Data Protection Manager enables best of class backup of Windows Guests in the same HyperV Cluster.

Just one more reason to evaluate HyperV , Virtual Machine Manager and Data Protection Manager

First we need to make sure that we have the DPM agent on all our HyperV Hosts so we can protect resouces in a cluster (the same feature set is now available in DPM 2012 for stand alone hyper-v hosts.

Create a Protection Group and browse though the cluster to the resource you want to protect.

Setup protection goals and transfer the data for the first backup

and lets transfer some data to the guest

And head back into the Data Protection Manager and Create Recovery Point

and Create Recovery Point for Short Term Protection

and or backup is running

and we can see that a backup will transfer the data moved into the guest instead of a full copy of the guest (this is new on stand alone hosts)

And we can see our VHD file for the guest in our recovery options and we are able to drill and and restore individual items if needed