Originally Posted by JClishe

I completely disagree. Just because you cannot do a backup of the VM doesn't make it useless in a production environment. You can still do traditional backups within the VM in the same manner that you backup physical servers. I have plenty of customers using both ESXi and Hyper-V Server (Microsoft's free hypervisor) in production environments and have their VM guests integrated with their existing backup solution quite happily.

Your example is correct though, in that Microsoft's free bare metal hypervisor, Hyper-V Server, has the advantage over ESXi in this area because you can do VM-level backups on Hyper-V Server using System Center Data Protection Manager.