Server 2012 R2 Essentials does not wake up clients

Question

Hi!
I am trying to get my Server 2012 R2 Essentials (Hyper-V VM) to do nightly backups of my Win 8.1 client PCs. As far as I understand the server should be able to wake up the clients automatically from hibernate (I selected this option during setup of the
connector).
Unfortunately this does not seem to work and I don't find any easy way to test the wake up procedure. What is really annoying is that I don't even find any documentation how the wake up procedure actually works. Does it use Wake On Lan? Are there any magic
packets involved?
Any help is welcome.
Anguel

Answer 1

Larry, thank you for your reply. Yes, I had activated the wake-up option during connector setup. Regarding your recommendation to make the computers wake up through their BIOS I think this won't work as we don't know when Windows Server Backup will actually
back up each computer if you have multiple PCs. This would mean that we would have to leave the PCs on all night, or do I misunderstand something?
In the meantime I found a very nice YouTube video that seems to explain in details how the whole process works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6ZOWjaZpIk
According to the video, the server simply schedules a task on the client PCs at some time in the range defined on the server: E.g. if I enter 11:00 - 12:00 this task seems to set a random wake-up time at e.g. 11:25 on the client PC. This task is then scheduled
to wake up the PC - didn't know that this is possible. I will now test again to see if this really works.
Another possible problem may be some special BIOS power settings, for example on my brand new Dell PCs there is a default Deep Sleep option in the BIOS concerning states S4 and S5. When this option was turned on (default) it prevented Wake On Lan from working
at all, although it was enabled in the BIOS, see e.g. here:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19434669.aspx
I first thought that Deep Sleep may be causing my wake-up problem but now according to the video above backup seems to rely on task scheduler only and not on WOL, let's see...
In each case I am very very disappointed because of the lack of docs for the latest Windows Client/Server products.
UPDATE: It seems to work now. As discussed above the clients are woken up by the task set by the server in the task scheduler. This works in hibernate mode. Still wondering how the server exactly schedules backups as it does not know how long a client backup
will take and therefore does not know when to schedule the next PC...
IMHO Windows Server should have offered the possibility to use Wake On Lan too. This is a much nicer way to do backups. It can't be that hard for Microsoft to send out a magic packet which would also be able to wake up a client when the user has shut it
down.
Anguel