After discussing all the aspects of capturing a successful backup, it's time to look at a backup solution in action. There are many vendors who offer enterprise backup solutions with different abilities, and Microsoft does this too, as part of its System Center 2012 R2 suite of applications called Data Protection Manager. Although these solutions are beyond the scope of this chapter, and this book as well, we will briefly look at DPM 2012 R2 towards the end of this chapter. In this section, we will focus on the Windows Server Backup utility.

Windows platforms come bundled with an inherent backup utility called Windows Server Backup (WSB). WSB was rolled out with the release of Windows Server 2008, and its predecessor was the NTBackup utility. WSB is not a role on Windows Server 2012 R2, but a feature that you can install via Server Manager or PowerShell. It is capable enough to capture Hyper-V backups both for VMs running on independent hosts and on a CSV on clustered...