Ctrl P - The Data Protection Manager Blog! : Disaster Recovery

DPM 2010 Beta is available now

JasonBuffington — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The Data Protection Manager (DPM) team at Microsoft is happy to announce the arrival of Data Protection Manager 2010 Beta.

I am Anand Kamat, Group Product Manager for the DPM development team, and since shipping DPM 2007 SP1 in Jan 2009, we have been on an amazing journey to get this feature packed release out to all our customers. This release has been different than our usual model. We moved our development model to shorter milestones. Though it made our pace extremely hectic, it allowed us to validate and stabilize key features in batches (well before Beta). Our 50+ CTP customers have given us a thumbs up for the DPM 2010 Beta feature set; it is ready for the rest of the world to start working with; and our team is looking forward to hear from you.

There are many things that we are excited talk about (not in any particular order) :

Virtualization

This has been one of the biggest investments that we made in DPM 2010, and we hope that you will absolutely love the features. First and foremost, DPM 2010 Beta protects highly available virtual machines (VM) deployed on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) clusters -- in addition to standalone Hyper-V servers and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. For all above mentioned server configurations, DPM 2010 Beta supports:

Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (For Windows Server 2008 R2): DPM 2010 is LiveMigration aware and seamlessly protects a VM after it migrates to another node of the Hyper-V R2 cluster to another without manual intervention.

Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.

Original Location Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports online recovery of the protected VM to the original location.

Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.

Laptop Protection

Though we enabled client protection in DPM 2007 SP1, it was designed for desktops and not optimized for mobile/often-disconnected user. DPM 2010 laptop feature is completely built from scratch and offers an optimized experience for DPM Admin as well as the laptop user.

Seamless backups for roaming users (Backup over VPN, Backup when connected, Alert for SLA’s not met)

Rich support for folder inclusion/exclusion and file types exclusion

Integration with local Shadow Copies for Vista & W7

Scales up to 1000 clients per DPM server

Support for XP, Vista, and Win7

Reliability and Manageability

In addition to features, this is an area where we’ve made some really significant investments in DPM 2010, with special recognition of the feedback from our enterprise customers who are deploying DPM across the large Windows farms within their heterogeneous environments.

A new “Auto-Grow” feature that will extend the replica volume as the production data grows.

You will see far fewer “Replica Inconsistent” errors and many of them will automatically get fixed by Auto-Rerun, Auto-CC (Consistency Check).

We have made DPM 2010 very flexible and robust to adapt for environment/configuration changes.

There is a new Backup SLA report that you can configure for your needs and get it emailed every day. You can even view it in the Protection View of the DPM UI, so no more custom scripts to determine if you have met your backup requirements.

Other Good Stuff

In addition to the above, a few of the other areas of enhancement include:

Exchange - DPM 2010 extends robust Exchange protection to Exchange 2010 DAG clusters.

SharePoint - For SharePoint 2010, there is no recovery farm required for item level recoveries and backups are optimized for large scale deployments.

SQL Server – DPM 2010 now includes is Instance-Level Protection and with Datasource Collocation, you can backup SQL servers with ~700-800 DBs. DPM 2007 provided optimized SQL backups and with SQL End User Recovery in DPM 2010, you should be able to give the control back to SQL Admin while retaining the storage benefits of DPM SQL backups.

Disaster Recovery replication (“DPM2DPM4DR”) - we have enabled cyclic protection (DPM A <==> DPM B) as well as chained (DPM A --> DPM B --> DPM C) protection for versatility in long-distance protection.

This beta marks an important step towards a highly reliable, manageable & scaled up DPM solution. We have a great team that is focused on customers and we had many passionate DPM 2007 customers that become DPM 2010 CTP customers to give us a great deal of testing and needs insight before this beta was released. I expect the same from DPM 2010 Beta customers as well – please tell us how you are using the product so that we can be sure DPM 2010 fits what you need in a data protection soltution.

So get ready to try the best ever DPM Beta release! And for more info, please check out the updated webpages on microsoft.com/DPM and look for our webcast on October 8.

I feel extremely proud of what we have accomplished and am excited to hear your feedback!

Thanks

Anand

Known Issues and recommended solutions on Secondary Protection (Disaster Recovery)

dpm — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:46:00 GMT

1. We have seen issues under Secondary DPM server when production server node is expanded in DPM UI, you do not see any datasources enumerated. As a result of this, you cannot add secondary protection for any of the datasources of that production server. This could happen due to one of the following reasons

a. One of the Protection Groups in Primary DPM has a special character in its name (like &, %, >. < etc) or one of the protected members of Primary DPM has special characters.

b. DPM Writer is not started in Primary DPM server

c. DPM Agent (by name DPMRA) crashed on Primary DPM server or Production server. If this is the case, you will find eventlog entries in respective servers.

d. Secondary DPM server could not enumerate datasources from production server. Run the powershell script under section “Check-ProductionServer” in the attached file on Secondary DPM Server. This will tell you whether Secondary DPM can enumerate datasources on production server or not. Steps to run this script

i. Copy the contents under the section “Check-ProductionServer” in the attached file to a file named as “Check-ProductionServer.ps1”.

ii. Run the powershell script “Check-ProductionServer.ps1” on a powershell window on Secondary DPM Server

e. You had manually installed x64 DPM agent on top of the DPM 20007 x64 Primary DPM. Normally, this is blocked. You cannot manually install DPM agent on a DPM server. But, we have a known issue on X64 version which unblocks this scenario. If this is the case, you will see an entry for “Microsoft System Center DPM Protection Agent” in Add/Remove programs.

General solutions for this problem:

i. Make sure that Protection Groups or Protected members in Primary DPM don’t have any special characters in their names. Rename all such Protection Groups in Primary DPM and retry secondary protection

ii. Make sure that DPM Writer is enabled and started/running on the Primary DPM server

iii. Make sure that DPMRA service hasn’t crashed on Primary DPM server or production server while adding secondary protection through Secondary DPM server.

iv. Disable and Enable protection for the production server which exhibits symptom 4 above.

v. Uninstall the “Microsoft System Center DPM Protection Agent” from Primary DPM server through Add/Remove programs. Run the batch script under section “UpdatePrimaryDPM” in the attached file on Primary DPM server. Steps to run this script.

- Copy the script under the section “UpdatePrimaryDPM” in the attached file to a new batch file called UpdatePrimaryDPM.cmd

- Run UpdatePrimaryDPM.cmd <DPM Intall Path>

E.g.: UpdatePrimaryDPM.cmd “C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM”

2. You get prerequisite not installed error while adding datasources for secondary protection. This might happen if the production server is a domain controller. Please contact Microsoft support if this is the case.

Thanks

Madhan S

CLI Script: To recover a DPM replica volume from data stored in tape

dpm — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:39:00 GMT

When a disaster occurs, and you lose your replica volume for any datasource, you could re-seed the replica from the backed-up data you have in tape. This little script initializes replica from a tape recovery point. The parameters have to be customized for your environment first as given below.

Save the attached file as a .ps1 file and invoke through the DPM Management Shell.

- Madhan S

New DPM case study -- AutoNation

JasonBuffington — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:06:36 GMT

A new DPM 2007 case study recently published on a great success story from AutoNation.

With 25,000 employees and $19 Billion US in revenue, AutoNation had a lot of data. One quote from Ed Olson,
Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer, AutoNation:

"We were trying to shoehorn 12 to 15 terabytes of data onto 15 tape drives each night, and it just wasn’t working."

The case study talks about protecting Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint data, along with disaster recovery capabilities - and ends with this conclusion:

Saving money was not an original impetus for moving to a new backup scheme, because the company had to make a change to accommodate rising data volumes. However, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 cost one-third of what competitive products cost, and annual backup-related maintenance chores are today one-third of what they were.

AutoNation also expects to save $30,000 annually in offsite tape-storage fees once it sets up System Center Data Protection Manager to copy files to the company’s disaster-recovery site in Chicago. “The fact that Data Protection Manager has a built-in disaster recovery capability makes it an unbelievable value, considering that its closest competitor costs three times as much without this feature,” Olson says.

Click here to read the case study of AutoNation with DPM 2007.

-- jason