Offered for free with the Essential Plus and higher editions (except Standard) of vSphere 4.0, there’s an interesting product which VMware didn’t promote at all so far: Data Recovery.

Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest OSes in ESX and ESXi.

Definitively a welcome addition to the vSphere suite, which puts the company in direct competition with long term partners like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam (and this may be a good reason for VMware to stay under the radar with it for a while).

In late November 2009 the company updated it to version 1.1 (build 207380) primarily to introduce support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

VDR 1.1 also introduces a new File Level Restore (FLR) client for Windows guests which finally allows to restore single files: