US Patent 8966318 Method to validate availability of applications within a backup image

A health services module can test availability of one or more applications installed in a virtual machine that is instantiated from a backup image of a virtual machine disk file. A health services module can be installed on a virtual machine to test one or more applications that a user wishes to validate. If the health services module indicates that the application(s) of the virtual machine are available, a guarantee of availability can be provided for the backup image of the virtual machine disk file. If the health services module indicates that the application(s) of the virtual machine are unavailable, no guarantee of availability can be given. The guarantee of availability can indicate that the backup image of the virtual machine disk file can be successfully restored, and that the application(s) of the virtual machine instantiated from the backup image are available to respond to a client request.