Bare metal backup and restore strategy for VMware server OS

Hi,

This is a pre-sales question. I want to create a backup of a VMware server - the actual VMware OS, including any guest OSs running in it. This is so I can do a total bare-metal restore, without having to reload WMware. Can this be done?

What is the standard practice with VMware? Running a single Windows Server OS, I can just create a disk image, then restore it to a bare drive and be up and running. I see references to a VMware virtual appliance. Is this where you load and run Acronis in order to backup the physical disks, or do you need to boot from the rescue media (then you couldn't run a scheduled backup)?

If you created a disk image of a physical drive on a VMware system, I assume that this would contain the guest OSs _and_ all data. It seems like this would take a long time and make for a rather large image file if there was 100gb of data or more. I'd like to be able to avoid backing up the data as a part of the disk image, and just use a standard backup program to restore files as needed.

Could you setup your VMware server with 2 physical disk partitions, put the guest OSs on one and the data on another to accomplish this? If anyone could point me to some specifics I'd appreciate it - a sale hinges on this.

I understand that there are differences in how Acronis Backup and Recovery works with the free version of VMware and the paid version. If I have the free version of VMware, do I just use the regular version of Acronis, or do I need the virtual server edition?

thanks in advance,

- Marty Fries
Imagimedia