How to backup the guest machines using Hyper V Server?

[vapb400]

Hello! I am pricing out hardware so I can begin testing vSphere and Hyper V R2. I have 60 days to test vSphere and I intend to figure it out as much as a I can. That being said, after the 60 days, the cost of it is extremely prohibitive for where I want to use it (eventually at my company), so I really want to look into Hyper V R2.

I have been reading a lot about Hyper V R2 and it looks pretty impressive compared to vSphere especially when you are factoring in price (we use entirely Windows Server).
So I think I am going to run Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, the free hypervisior-only on the servers.
When I was ready to move things out of the testbed and into the production environment I was planning on purchasing the Virtual Machine Manager (we will have less than the 5 hosts)
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/pricing-licensing.aspx

I will eventually be getting a iSCSI SAN, not sure if that changes anything.....but...how should I be running backups? I am sorry if this is a stupid question, I have searched up and down but I havent found much about doing it with the hypervisor-only, just with Server 2008 running Hyper-V

So what would be the best way to back up my VMs?

Thanks!

 

[lizardking009]

We script a weekly export of the VMs. The script saves the VM, exports it to a backup server, then starts the VM. The exported folder is backed up with the rest of the file server data.