I have a Sharepoint (OSS 2007) farm running on three virtual machines in VMWare ESX, plus a SQL Server backend on physical hardware. During a recent Business Continuity Planning event I tried restoring the sharepoint farm with only the config and content databases, and failed to get things working.

My plan was to build a new sharepoint server, then attach this to a restoration config database and install the Central Management site on this server, then reattach the content databases. This failed at the Central Management part of the plan. So I am back to the drawing board on the best strategy for backup and recovery, with reducing the time and complexity of the restore job the main objective.

I haven't been able to find much in the way of discussion of backup/restore strategies for Sharepoint in a VMWare environment, so I figured I'd see if anyone on server fault has any ideas or experience.