One of the handier features of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 is the ability to easily replicate virtual machines. Ben Armstrong’s virtualisation blog walks through the command line steps needed to do this if you’re not a GUI fan. [Ben Armstrong’s Virtualization Guide]
How To Back Up Hyper-V Virtual Machines
If you can’t back up and restore a VM, then not sure you should be working with them 😐
Also surprised that they’re not using powershell for this.. Most underused tool in history.
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh848559.aspx
Interesting to use wbadmin to create a vhd file of virtual machines which are already in vhd format.
shadow copy is much more flexible for this purpose (I. E. create a snapshot then use utilities to copy the files.) no down time for any vm. the restoring process is simpler also just copy the files.
Some third-party backup vendors offer command-line interface of PowerShell to allow users to perform backup, replication and recovery tasks. Have a look at Veeam Backup for Hyper-V – http://www.veeam.com/backup