This white paper discusses optimizing backup and recovery for VMware Infrastructure using EMC Avamar. It provides an overview of VMware Infrastructure and its components. It then discusses three solutions for backing up virtual machines using Avamar: backing up via the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy server, installing Avamar agents inside each virtual machine, or installing an agent on the ESX server service console. Avamar reduces backup sizes and times through global data deduplication.