With Data Protection Manager 2012 its possible to protect whole virtual machines and recover then as full machines , saving the time to install agents and rebuild the OS from bare metal

With Data Protection Manager 2012 we have the ability to restore a complete virtual machine, backup needs to be performed with the Hyper-V integration for DPM

Under protection we need to select the Microsoft Hyper-V and Recover

If we drill down to the VHD level only the VHD file will be recovered and that can only be restored to a network location.

Option one for restore is Recover to Original Instance

It will then recover the vhd files and config files

When Recovery Starts DPM will take the Virtual Machine offline

And after recovery is completed the Virtual Machine needs to be started manually , but no other interaction is needed.

Or is is possible to restore the virtual machine to another host

And we need to select a destination for the machine when redirected to another host.

DPM will recovery config files and any VHD file with the virtual machine

Success !

And DPM will register the virtual machine on the new host , depending on network configuration there might be a need to change the network settings after the recovery

This will still require some extra work if restore from cluster as there isn't a way (as I see it) to recovery to a new cluster only to files shares on Hyper-V hosts , but in a disaster recovery scenario a cluster isn't always available