In Virtual Iron 3.1, you have three options to backup your virtual servers:

1. Use the guest operating system's standard backup software.

2. If you don't mind a very short outage, you can shut down the guest and simply clone the virtual hard disk. This is scriptable and takes just a few minutes per guest, so your outage would be very small.

3. Snapshot the LUN that your virtual hard disks are on (you can do this while the guests are running or stopped) and mount the snapshotted volume on another server. Then, you can backup the virtual hard disks (which are just files in VHD format) or mount the virtual hard disks and backup the files within the virtual server. The benefit of this method is that the file-level backup occurs outside of the guest OS, so it will not take any guest resources.

Both the second and third backup options are preferable because:

- Existing backups sometimes cannot occur during a single backup window, which exposes a company to vulnerabilities if files cannot be recovered later.

- Backups don't serve the purpose for disaster recovery. It is hard to move the backups to a new physical server in the event of failure (for example, a natural disaster).