This white paper discusses the challenges of backing up and recovering large scale VMware environments. As organizations increasingly adopt virtualization, protecting large numbers of virtual machines becomes more difficult due to redundancy of data and strain on system resources. Traditional backup methods are not optimized for virtual infrastructures. The paper recommends planning backup and recovery strategies when expanding virtualization to avoid potential problems. It also introduces EMC Avamar as a solution that can ease data protection for large virtual deployments through efficient management and backup of virtual machines.