Q. How do I enable Item Level Recovery (ILR) for Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) protected by Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010?

A. DPM provides the ability to recover individual items from a protected Hyper-V VM. You can navigate the file system of the VM from within the DPM 2010 console and recover information, as shown here.

To enable this capability within DPM, the Hyper-V role must be installed on the DPM 2010 server, because the ILR works through the Hyper-V WMI Provider for the mounting of the Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) so individual files can be recovered. The Hyper-V role is required to enable VHD mounting from Windows Server 2008 because only Server 2008 R2 has native support for VHD mounting without the Hyper-V role.