This brings us to the end of the penultimate chapter of this book. This was also the last chapter from the Hyper-V advanced topics series. It focused on the backup and recovery aspects of Hyper-V and the importance of maintaining backups from a business continuity perspective.

At the inception of this chapter, we reviewed alternate options for protecting data, such as maintaining copies of VHDs and exporting virtual machines to safe locations. We again reviewed the benefits of checkpoints (Hyper-V snapshots) and saw how they fare as an alternative to traditional backups.

As we progressed further, we reviewed the traditional backup methodology based on the VSS framework, and you learned the dynamics of VSS under the hood. We also focused on the backup improvements and changes rolled out with Windows Server 2012 R2, and saw how they are going to benefit the consistency of backed-up data. Later on, we reviewed the possible backup strategies for identifying situations such as the following...