You have probably been thinking of how to back up and restore your vCloud content; here are some thoughts on this.
Surprisingly, it actually doesn't work well at all (at the time of writing this book). Most backup vendors can currently back up VMs from the vCloud quite well; however, they don't have a clear concept about restores yet.
For backups there are basically two methods. The first is to use a backup agent inside the VMs that transfers the data to be backed up via the network. Software examples would be Symantec NetBackup and IBM Tivoli. The second method is to integrate the backup with the storage backend. A software example would be CommVault. What happens here is that the backup is done by backing up the VM directories directly on the datastores.
Let's consider the downside of the storage-integrated backups first. Most backup vendors have no problem when dealing with thin-provisioned VMs, but you may want...