Ctrl P - The Data Protection Manager Blog! : Exchange Server

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

CLI Script: Script to generate DPM configuration report

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:54:00 GMT

The attached script generates a report of the mapping between each Exchange Server, the backup Protection Groups and its associated SGs.

Krishna Mangipudi

CLI Script: DPM status report

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:50:00 GMT

The following script generates a comprehensive report of failures and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

CLI Script: To generate status reports

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:42:00 GMT

The attached script generates a comprehensive report of the status of all backups and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

Customer Blog Post on DPM 2007 SP1 -- Convergent Computing

JasonBuffington — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:57:00 GMT

With the release of DPM SP1 and having an opportunity to be on the beta of the update, thought I'd share my experiences...

For those who have worked with Data Protection Mgr in the past, you probably have already experienced the concept of ongoing incremental digital backups of your servers that DPM provides.

Those new to DPM and who have relied on 'tape' for years to backup your information, DPM is a departure from fragile 50 yr old magnetic tape concepts and replaces tape with extreme high performance and flexibility provided by digital copies of data on hard drive media.

In the network environment at my organization, we have a pretty typical Microsoft Exchange, fileservers, domain controllers, SQL, and SharePoint environment as most, a total of 60 servers and 1.5TB that we backup every night. But instead of kicking off a backup to tape of all of our application servers every night (hoping that the backup finishes by the morning, and even more so hoping the 'tape' is good when we really need to recover something off of tape in the event of a disaster), we setup DPM 2007 to snapshot over 3TB of information many months ago, and now every 15 minutes, incremental updates are added to our DPM backup servers pretty much immediately. At any point, we can restore a backup that is less than 15-minutes old, or even recover a portion of a server such as a specific file, file folder, volume, or other data increment that meets our needs. And all from high speed digital indexes of the information, no need to stream a tape or build an index off tape. Data in DPM is automatically updated for us.

This is a welcome evolution in IT processes, instead of doing the same thing (tape backups) like we've done for years, to actually adopt a process that provides multi-step recovery from incremental digital copies of data. A pretty slick process that has completely changed our internal perspective on disaster recovery away from a single product like a 'tape backup' to an entire end to end strategy on disaster recovery all based on "out of the box" technologies from Microsoft.

We're using Microsoft's Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) on Exchange so that effectively we have 2 copies of our Exchange databases from Exchange with one in our primary site, and another copy in our offsite datacenter. We're using DPM to backup our 2nd (passive) copy of Exchange data so we have this 3rd copy of data on DPM. And while we were doing a tape backup of our DPM server and storing the data offsite, we just started using the Iron Mountain’s service as part of DPM SP1 where their servers do a cloud-based backup of our DPM server, so effectively our DPM server is being backed up over the Internet with data vaulted offsite with NO use of tapes anymore. This same primary/secondary data store process is being done with SharePoint and our SQL applications using SQL Mirroring, and file servers using Windows Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R).

Now, at any point, we can recover our primary server with our secondary CCR server, we can recover our primary and secondary Exchange, SharePoint, file servers, or global catalog servers from DPM, and if we lose the entire environment (both our primary and offsite datacenters), we can recover everything from the "cloud" to any datacenter anywhere.

All of our servers are running on Hyper-V for virtualization (something that the new DPM 2007 SP1 has added backup support of Hyper-V servers and running guest images), so a complete end to end disaster recovery solution from Microsoft that is the backbone of our internal IT operations.

As we have proven this works internally for our own IT operations, over the past year, we've been implementing this exact same scenario for the clients we provide consulting services for. Anything from small 50-person law firms through large Fortune 50 enterprise organizations. We've ripped out dozens of 3rd party DR products that provide small bits and pieces to their backup and recovery processes with a complete, lower cost solution based on out of the box features from Microsoft that organizations have for the most part already owned much of the licenses as part of their enterprise agreements.

In a time when organizations are looking to simplify IT, lower costs by decreasing redundant licenses and products, minimize finger pointing between competing products and technologies, and having a solution that works in this manner has been very successful at helping us and our clients to meet their business cost cutting and IT simplification initiatives.

*********

Rand Morimoto has been in the IT industry for over 30-yrs and has written dozens of bestselling books on information technologies including Windows 2008 Unleashed, Exchange 2007 Unleashed, Microsoft Hyper-V Unleashed, Network Security for IT Professionals, and the like. Rand works with technologies 2-3 years before their release and works with organizations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in planning, implementing, and leveraging technologies to simplify IT operations.

Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007 is now available

JasonBuffington — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:16:55 GMT

The DPM team is very excited to announce the release of Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007.

What is new in Service Pack 1	http://www.microsoft.com/SystemCenter/DataProtectionManager/en/us/WHATs-NEW.aspx

DPM 2007 SP1 x86	http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125991
DPM 2007 SP1 x64	http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125992

SP1 videos on TechNet Edge	http://edge.technet.com/tags/DPM

Upcoming Webcast on SP1 on January 8, 2009	http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399151

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 provides continuous data protection for Windows application and file servers using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media and includes the following expanded capabilities:

Protection of Hyper-V™ virtualization platforms, including both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, has been added to the existing set of protected workloads, building on the virtualization protection originally delivered for Virtual Server 2005.
Enhanced SQL Server 2008 protection, including the addition of new protection capabilities for mirrored databases, support for parallel backups of databases within a single instance, and the ability to move data from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for migration scenarios.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 receive index protection, significant catalog optimization, and support for mirrored content databases.
Added protection for Exchange Server 2007 Standby Cluster Replication (SCR), enabling a complete disaster recovery solution that leverages SCR failover alongside DPM point-in-time restores.

In addition to enhancing the protection of each of the core Microsoft application workloads, additional capabilities have also been introduced with the release of DPM 2007 SP1, such as:

Local Data Source Protection enabling the DPM 2007 SP1 server to act as a branch office server offering self-protecting File Services and Virtualization hosting within one platform.
Cross-Forest Protection allowing large enterprise customers with multiple Active Directory® forests to now have even more flexibility in their DPM deployments.
Provision for a Client DPML answers customer demand for a more cost-effective way to protect Windows XP and Windows Vista clients using the same DPM 2007 infrastructure that protects their servers
Disaster Recovery capabilities within DPM 2007 SP1 now include the ability to leverage a third-party vaulting partner via the cloud (SaaS)

All of this new functionality builds on the features released in the DPM 2007 ‘Rollup Update’ in June 2008, which provided protection of Windows Server 2008, including Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 core, Windows Server 2008 System State and BitLocker™ support – as well as new tape media capabilities around tape sharing and media library sharing.

Between ‘Rollup Update’ and Service Pack 1, most of the core features of DPM 2007 have seen incremental capabilities or workload advancements which promises to keep Data Protection Manager on a trajectory toward improving how Microsoft customers protect and recover their Windows application and file servers with the Microsoft backup and recovery solution.

-- jason

Why does DPM use the Recovery Storage Group in Exchange?

JasonBuffington — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:27:46 GMT

One of the more common questions that we hear from DPM customers is around the DPM dependency on the Exchange RSG, while other backup technologies do not require it.

How Microsoft customers were protecting Exchange previously

When Microsoft looked at how customers were protecting Windows applications today, we found two troubling scenarios:

1. Most customers were using one or more technologies for traditional nightly tape backup, particularly within heterogeneous environments. In addition, many were using or considering the use of different technologies for disk-to-disk replication, often per workload. And some were also using a third type of storage technology for long-distance synchronization for disaster recovery or business continuity solutions. Often the mix of these solutions from various vendors created their own supportability issues, based on interoperability as well as multiple management tools and monitoring views.

2. Many customers expressed frustration over a support gap between protection/recovery solutions and the workloads themselves. We have often heard customers and partners complain that while their backup software reported successful backups and their recoveries reported complete, when they attempt to bring the data online, they either can’t or discover corruption.

· Calling the backup vendor, they are told that it must be the application.

· Calling Microsoft support, we provide best effort support but sometimes surmise that the data was not backed-up or restored properly.

There isn’t necessarily fault here, just the reality of multiple vendors with multiple approaches to solving the problem.

DPM 2007 was designed with these two scenarios in mind:

1. To provide a consistent and unified disk-to-disk-to-tape experience, that included near-continuous protection, routine tape backup and disaster recovery long-distance replication within a single protection product.

2. Provide the best possible backup and recovery solution that assured not only reliability, but also supportability.

Strategic Choices for how DPM does what it does

To do this, we did make some strategic choices. Because there were already several heterogeneous backup technologies that many customers believe fall short around complex Windows server application deployments – we chose to focus on the workloads that we are committed to, namely the Microsoft platforms and products: Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint products and technologies, and our virtualization environments.

The other strong commitment we made was to use only the backup and recovery methods that are wholly supported by the product teams of the workloads we are protecting:

To protect data, we rely on the Volume Shadowcopy Services capabilities that Microsoft has been providing since Windows Server 2003 and the application servers of that timeframe. Almost every DPM protected workload uses a VSS writer that is provided by that product team, or other backup mechanism provided by the workload itself, as the best known and most supported way to secure that information -- as it was intended from those who know the inner-workings of the application itself. These are not hidden mechanisms or secret calls - they are well published as the intended mechanisms provided by the application as the intended way to back them up. But many legacy protection products choose to use other methods.

To restore data, we comply with the restoration capabilities and architecture of the application. In the case of Exchange, that means using the Recovery Storage Group – and specifically restoring the database into the RSG, and then using Exchange tools to selectively restore more granular objects. In the case of SharePoint, we use the ‘Recovery Farm’ capability that the SharePoint team developed for that purpose. In each case, our restore capability is tied to the functionality provided by that platform. Each protected workload has its own restore capabilities, and DPM is specifically designed to leverage them. Again, these mechanisms are well published, but not followed by some legacy protection products.

Supportability for Exchange protection solutions

While we are aware that there are some other backup products which offer a restore experience that is perceived as more integrated or transparent, this experience is made possible by reverse engineering the Exchange database and the use of other processes which are not supportable by the Exchange team. These approaches create a risk of database corruption in your Exchange installation and limits the Exchange team’s ability to fully support that installation should you encounter problems later.

Even before DPM was released, Microsoft saw significant issues with some backup technologies that tried to synthesize Exchange information stores to selectively restore data – and then push it directly back into the production database. This sometimes resulted in latent corruption that was only later discovered. The Exchange team published a number of KB articles detailing these risks and the associated support limitations they create, including:

KB 904845 addresses “Microsoft support policy for third-party products that modify or extract Exchange database contents”

Similarly, for disk-to-disk replication mechanisms, KB 895847 addresses “Multi-site data replication support for Exchange Server”

What is the future of Mailbox Recovery?

Looking towards the future, we are actively working with the application product teams to help them create innovative solutions that include restore capabilities that are either more direct (instead of the RSG/Recovery Farm), more granular (mailbox/message), or perhaps simply more transparent – but which are also fully supported – at which point, DPM will most happily deliver on that experience. We are making progress in that front. But innovation takes time.

In the near term, we have identified select partners that have been able to enhance the DPM backup capability with a more granular recovery mechanism, but in a way that is understood and approved of by the application product teams – e.g. Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange, enabling mailbox & message level restoration from the DPM restored replica. Details can be found on their site.

Finally, we also wanted to address some inaccuracies in the DPM Whitepaper on “How to Protect Exchange with DPM 2007”. The initial release inadvertently glossed over some of the details and did not reflect the full capabilities and processes for mailbox recovery correctly. When we learned that the paper was not providing clear guidance from some Exchange community folks and DPM customers, we immediately pulled the paper to correct it. We worked with the DPM engineering team as well as an Exchange MVP writer to provide better guidance, and it was re-posted last week at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92497.

We hope this clarifies why DPM does what it does around Exchange protection to ensure that our customers have not only a great backup solution that protects Exchange in the manner that the Exchange developers believe that it should -- leveraging its VSS writer for fast block-based synchronization along with log backups, with additional benefits like offloading ESEUTIL and providing flexible protection options for CCR environments -- but also a strong and flexible recovery solution that allows for storage group, database and yes, mailbox, recovery in a way that is wholly supported and sustainable.

Jason Buffington
DPM Senior Technical Product Manager

Windows Storage Solutions

Protecting and Recovering E-Mail Using DPM 2007 and Exchange 2007

dpm — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:00:41 GMT

The following was posted by Harsh Mittal, the Exchange protection feature lead with the DPM product team. For more information around protecting Microsoft Exchange with Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007, please check out:

How to protect Exchange Server with DPM 2007 - resources on www.microsoft.com/DPM

Revised technical whitepaper, covering these concepts and many others

As more and more data is stored in electronic formats, data backup and recovery is increasingly becoming a key business requirement. Apart from being an operational requirement, today companies also may need to maintain a backup of their data for other reasons such as to fulfill legal requirements. Data comes in various forms, such as operational data, accounting information, and emails among others.

In this blog post, we look at Exchange data recovery goals and why Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) is an effective solution to protect emails and mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 (Exchange).

Mailbox/mail item recoveries requests can be broadly classified as:

· Short-term

· Long-term

The data retention features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 do provide for short-term retention and recovery of data, thereby not always necessitating an external backup solution for short-term retention within the server. This does not necessarily translate to not requiring a recovery scenario for failed servers, components or site-level calamities.

Above and beyond short term recovery, an external backup solution is required for long-term retention and recovery. DPM is designed as a best-of-breed data retention and recovery solution for Exchange. DPM’s recovery point search, mailbox cataloging and consistency check features within DPM provides users with a great experience when it comes to recovering an Exchange mailbox. DPM does all this while staying complaint to the Exchange-support recovery processes to support data consistency and reliability.

Short term recovery

A typical recovery request usually results from accidental deletions of an email or a mailbox. The error is typically noticed within days or, at worst, weeks of the incident. Microsoft Exchange’s Deleted Item Retention and Mailbox Retention features allow you to recover deleted content without the involvement of backup infrastructure.

Using the Deleted Item Retention feature the end user can directly recover deleted items from Microsoft Outlook without the intervention of the Exchange administrator. The recovery of hard-deleted (Shift + Delete) emails is also supported.

The Deleted Mailbox Retention feature allows the administrator to recover deleted mailboxes.

The Exchange administrator, based on the organization’s requirements, can set the time limit for such retrieval. By default, Exchange 2007 enables deleted item retention for 14 days and deleted mailbox retention for 30 days. Both these features require the recovery to take place within the retention period.

Exchange’s recovery features come at storage cost, the longer the retention period, the more storage required on the server. Moving data to tape for reducing cost will increase the recovery time, as the database will have to be staged to disk before restoring mail/mailbox. The amount of required storage will vary based on number of users, and their messaging-related behavior. Any solution will be a tradeoff between recovery time and cost.

Long Term Recovery

While Exchange’s out-of-box data retention features are impressive and suffice for short-term recovery needs, they are not designed to protect data over longer periods. Understanding this need, Exchange has provided technologies that allow partners to build long-term backup and recovery solutions.

A typical request would require a set of emails or copy of the mailbox to be retrieved from a specific point in time, possibly dating back months or even years. One of the scenarios in which Exchange’s retention features are limited is when an entire PST file is deleted.

Mail archiving features (journaling) enable companies to keep a record of electronic communications (including emails) for a longer specified period (usually 3-7 years). These solutions have very specific requirements like

· Quick searchability of archive based on the content and metadata

· Ensuring that all the content has been captured

· Audit trails for access of the data

· Retention & Expiration

And so on

Microsoft Exchange’s Hosted Archive Services is one such offering. Microsoft Gold or Certified partners may also provide similar solutions. These offerings/solutions, however, can be expensive particularly if you do not have such specific requirements.

Recovering an Exchange Mailbox

Irrespective of the backup solution, the procedure to recover a mailbox outside the retention period is the same. The most effective solution to backup Exchange data would consist of the following steps:

1. Take point-in-time snapshots of the Exchange database

2. Store them on a tape or disk. Tape is the preferred media to store data over long periods of time.

The process to retrieve this data would be as follows:

1. Recover the recovery point to disk from the tape on which it is stored

2. Mount the required point-in-time snapshot of the Exchange database using the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA)

3. Retrieve the required set of emails or mailboxes using the Recovery Storage Group (RSG).

Using the RSG is the only Exchange-supported way to recover mailboxes from database backups. Exchange does not support solutions that reverse engineer mailbox database schema. Using any solution that reverse engineers the database schema can result in data corruption.

Note: Click here to learn more about Microsoft support policy for third-party products that modify or extract Exchange database contents

An effective backup and retrieval solution should

System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007

Allow search for point-in-time snapshot based on parameters like alias, display name, date range, etc.

Allows you to search for mailboxes based on various parameters, thus allow you to zero-in on the tape and snapshot that you are looking for.

Maintain a list of mailboxes that are part of the database at the time of taking the snapshot. As mailbox backups can go back many years, tracking a mailbox can be a difficult process. As many organizations have policies to move mailboxes for load balancing, finding a right point-in-time can be challenging.

Tracks the mailboxes that were the part of the database at the time of the backup. DPM also returns a list of adjacent snapshots so you can fall back on a closer snapshot in case the snapshot you need cannot be used for some reason.

Maintain location of the point-in-time snapshots of the database.

Provides a media-tracking feature that returns the exact tape label and barcode of the media on which the snapshot is stored.

Maintain version of Microsoft Exchange and information about all service packs on the server at the time when the snapshot was taken.

Tracks this information for you and presents it during mailbox recovery.

DPM follows the Exchange-supported process for backup and retrieval of an Exchange database to keep track of the information required to facilitate a smooth retrieval of data.

DPM performs Eseutil consistency checks on the data written to disk or tape to ensure that the backup is not corrupt and that it will be readable when required.

Summary

Backup and recovery of emails and mailboxes is an important requirement in today’s digital age. While Exchange provides effective tools to recover data lost by accidental deletions, long term backups are not provided for within Exchange. DPM is an effective solution to backup and restore Exchange data. DPM provides features like mailbox cataloging, recovery point search and consistency checks to provide a smooth and surprise-free backup and recovery experience.

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

Protecting Exchange Server with DPM 2007 - new blog post from MS Exchange Team

JasonBuffington — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:37:00 GMT

The Microsoft Exchange team blog (msexchangeteam.com) recently posted an absolutely phenomenal blog post that describes exactly how DPM 2007 protects Exchange Server data. With soem really good explanations and nice graphics -- we might just reprint it as a new technical whitepaper (somewhat kidding).

Our hats are off to Doug Gowans, with help from Ruud Baars and Ben Appleby. Good stuff, guys !!

If you are looking to protect Exchange Server data -- take a look at their post.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/19/448477.aspx

Data Protection Manager 2007 Storage Calculator

dpm — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:21:00 GMT

In order to assist customers in designing their storage layout for Data Protection Manager 2007, we have put together a calculator that focuses on outlining the storage capacity requirements based on a set of input factors.

For the first release, the calculator focuses on Exchange 2007 backup scenarios only. Future releases may include other technologies.

The calculator uses all the recommendations outlined in

· Protecting Exchange Server with DPM 2007 White Paper - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92497

· Exchange 2007 Planning Storage Configurations - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124518.aspx

· Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Calculator - http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432207.aspx

· DPM Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/

The calculator does not make any recommendations toward storage design (RAID parity, number of disks, etc) as the storage design is largely dependent on the type of storage array being utilized.

The calculator is broken out into the following sections (worksheets):

· Input

· DPM ExBackup Requirements

Important: The data points provided in the calculator are an example configuration. As such any data points entered into the Input worksheet are specific to that particular configuration and do not apply for other configurations. Please ensure you are using the correct data points for your design.

Input

This section is where you enter in all the relevant information regarding your design, so that the calculator can generate what you need in order to achieve your design.

Note: There are many input factors that need to be accounted for before you can design your solution. Each input factor is briefly listed below; there are additional notes within the calculator that explain them in more detail.

Exchange Server Configuration

1. How many Exchange mailbox servers are there? Enter the number of Exchange mailbox servers that will be backed up by DPM.

2. How many databases will each Exchange server have? Enter the number of databases each Exchange server will have. This value can be obtained from the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator's Storage Requirements tab "Database Configuration" table.

3. What is the LUN Design Architecture? Enter the LUN Design architecture each Exchange mailbox server will use. This can be obtained from the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator's LUN Requirements tab "LUN Design" table.

4. What is the total database disk space required? Enter in the total amount of disk that will be used by each Exchange mailbox server. This can be obtained from the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator's Storage Requirements tab "Disk Space & Performance Requirements" table by referring to the "Total Database Disk Space Required / Replica" value.

5. What is the average transaction log generation rate per storage group each day? Enter the total logs generated on the server. This can be obtained from the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator's Storage Requirements tab "Server Configuration" table by referring to the "Average Transaction Logs Generated / SG / Day" value.

DPM VSS Backup Configuration

1. What is the backup rate? Enter in the rate at which you can backup your Exchange data. The actual back rate that can be achieved will depend on three things:

a. Read rate from source LUN – if designed properly, this should not be a huge problem unless you run backup during peak times or you’re running multiple threads from the same set of disks.

b. Effective write rate at the medium- This is the speed with which DPM can write to the storage pool disks. When doing initialization, the writes are typically sequential in nature. However for express fulls, the writes are typically random in nature.

c. The network rate - It is recommended that you use a Gbps network connectivity between the Exchange server and the DPM server. DPM can also be configured to use a dedicated NIC to perform the backups thereby getting a higher throughput without loading your corporate network.

2. What is the restore rate? Enter the rate at which you can restore your data.

3. What is the VSS Backup Frequency? Enter the frequency at which you perform an incremental backup synchronization. This value determines your point in time copy, and thus affects your recovery point objective. You can choose from 15 minutes all the way up to once per day.

4. What is the retention range? The retention range specifies how long you want to keep a backup so that you can recover it. After the retention period, the backup is deleted from DPM.

5. What is the Express Full frequency? Specify how often you wish to perform an express full backup, either daily or weekly. Express full backups take more time than an incremental synchronization, but the benefit of more frequent express fulls is that the time for a recovery is reduced since fewer logs need to be played back in order to restore to a point in time.

DPM ExBackup Requirements

This section outlines the capacity requirements for the DPM server.

Calculations

The Calculations Pane performs all the calculations based on the input factors and outputs the key calculations into the Results Pane. For this blog, I will not delve into the specifics of the calculations, but feel free to review them within the calculator.

Results

Based on the above input factors, the calculator will recommend the following settings.

Backup Configuration

The Backup Configuration table will provide you with

· The Number of Databases / LUN, which is derived from the LUN Design Architecture model chosen.

· The Backup Methodology, which in this case, since we are using DPM, will always be a VSS backup.

· The Backup Frequency, which was an option selected on the input worksheet.

Backup Window Requirements

The Backup Window Requirements table will provide you with

· The Express Full Backup Window / SG is the amount of time it will take to back up a single storage group via an Express Full backup. A DPM express full backup is basically a full backup that only needs to transfer the changed blocks since the last express full. Hence this is faster and requires sending lesser data across the network in order to perform the full backup. You should validate this metric against your Service Level Agreements to determine if it is acceptable.

· The Incremental or Differential backup Window / SG is the amount of time it will take to perform an incremental synchronization for a single storage group and is based on the number of transaction logs that are generated during the backup window.

DPM Server Configuration

The DPM Server Configuration table will provide you with

· The Recommended Number of DPM servers needed to support the Exchange infrastructure. This value is based on the number of storage groups (max 250 per server) or the DPM storage requirements (max 40TB).

· The Recommended Number of Processors Cores / DPM Server needed to support DPM. At the time of this writing, Microsoft recommends having 4 processor cores per DPM server.

· The Recommended RAM Configuration / DPM Server needed to support the DPM activities. At the time of this writing, Microsoft recommends having 8GB of physical memory.

· The Recommended Virtual Memory Configuration / DPM Server need to support DPM activities. This value is based on the amount of data being backed up.

· The Total Storage Capacity Needed outlines the necessary capacity requirements to back up all the Exchange mailbox servers.

DPM Space Requirements / Exchange Server

The DPM Space Requirements table outlines the replica size and recovery point volume size for each storage group on an Exchange mailbox server.

DPM Protected Group Configuration Data / Exchange Server

The DPM Protected Group Configuration Data table outlines each protected group (based on the LUN Design Architecture and the number of databases housed on each LUN), the synchronization frequency for each protected group, the retention range, and the express full backup schedule.

Conclusion

Hopefully you will find this calculator invaluable in helping to determine your storage requirements for backing up Exchange 2007 using Data Protection Manager 2007. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email dpmcalc AT microsoft DOT com.

Download the calculator from the attachment to this post.

[The calculator has been updated on 12 June 2009]

Note: This calculator is saved in the new Excel 2007 format. If you are not running Office 2007, then you will need the compatibility pack for Office XP and 2003 which can be obtained from here.

How does DPM really protect data?

JasonBuffington — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:35:00 GMT

This entry probably should have been a cross-posted ... but please check out my individual blog's latest post on how the DPM 2006 and DPM 2007 drivers work.

Also included is a 10 minute streaming video on how DPM 2007 uses VSS, as well as the native transaction logs of Exchange Server and SQL Server, as part of data protection.

Streaming Video - 9 minutes - How does DPM really protect data?