I’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling through Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and the one commonality between my experiences in each of these three countries is that I don’t speak the local language in any of them. In high school, I studied French, not Spanish, and Portuguese wasn’t even taught. So, at restaurants I can never read the menu and I usually attempt, in very broken Spanish, to ask the waiter for a recommendation (“Que es bueno?”). Then he says something and I nod enthusiastically and smile. The process reminds me a bit of what backup administrators face when they are trying to figure out how to back up their VMware environments. There are many ways to do it and often they don't know which is best. The easy and obvious way is to run a backup client from inside each virtual machine. In some cases that works fine, but in other cases, all the backups running simultaneously overloads the physical server (the challenges of sharing I/O and CPU across a whole lot of processes). Another way is to run a backup client from inside the service console. And yet another way is to leverage VMware's VCB technology, which is a high-performance snapshotting solution that moves the VM image to a separate (proxy) server from which the actual backup is executed. So, which is best – the red salsa or the green (verde)? Well, it depends. Because the answer is not the same for everyone, and sometimes, trying to decipher the options is like reading a menu written in a language you don't understand. You might be looking for the easy, watered-down "mild" solution, when what your environment really needs is the latest and greatest deduplication technology (picante hot!). Consider asking your waiter - err, data protection vendor - who can explain the options to you and who speaks your language. Check out more information here to determine which approach is most suitable for your unique needs.