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It can be done with the certutil command line tool or the GUI. Just perform these steps: Go to the Certificate Authority (e.g. through Server Manager / Tools or Administrative Tools) Right-click the CA to backup All tasks Backup... Similar if you want to restore a CA. Sources: Training Guide Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 R2 Services (MCSA), page 216f Keywords: Windows Server 2012 R2, Active Directory, Certification Authority

"The root of the trust chain in any PKI is the Root Certification Authority." For security reasons the machine that you will be using is an isolated / standalone / non-domain joined machine. You want to limit access to this machine as much as possible. The function of the Root CA is to "generate the server certificates that will be installed on the subordinate CAs. And those subordinate CAs will actually distribute user and computer certificates." Note that the default hash algorithm SHA-1 has been flagged as weak meanwhile. As this will be the root CA you can and should go for something strong like SHA512 and a key length of 4096 bits. Sources: Installing a Two Tier PKI Hierarchy in Windows Server 2012: Part II, Installing a Root Certification Authority with the GUI Step by Step Install Root Certificate Authority on Windows Server 2012 R2 Designing and Implementing a PKI: Part II Implementation Phases and Certificate Authority Installation TechNet

In the attempt to combine private cloud (aka on-premise installation), public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure) and hosted cloud (servers provided by 3rd parties) Microsoft released a while ago the Azure Service Bus through the additional install for Windows Server 2012 R2 called "Windows Azure Pack". The Service Bus provides unified messaging capabilities across the different deployment scenarios. It addresses 3 core scenarios: 1. Application Messaging Patterns with Service Bus Messaging with the Service Bus allows building loosely coupled applications. "To enable a wide variety of messaging scenarios, Service Bus provides message queues and “Publish/Subscribe” topics. A queue is a message store in which messages are ordered by send date. One or multiple senders can send messages into a queue, and one or multiple receivers can read and remove messages from the queue. Once a receiver has received a message, that message cannot be received by another receiver. T