Words and Software : Data Protection Manager

The speed of moving data

Jeanie Decker — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:10:00 GMT

I'm clearing out some of the blog posts I've clipped over the years and came across one that I saved when I was working on DPM. Jonathan Schwartz's article on how long it takes to move a petabyte of data caught my attention because it related to the DPM issue of when you might prefer tape storage to disk storage.

A petabyte is awfully huge, of course. As he explains, "A petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a million gigabytes, or a billion megabytes. Or 8 billion megabits." But thinking it over...my own little PC at home has 500 GB now. And 2000 workstations could be a decent size company. Not that all those workstations would fill up their 500 GB hard drives, but it made the data size not so inconceivable to me. Lots of servers, lots of data to maintain and archive - the numbers could get pretty big.

Then he does the math:

"So if you had a half megabit per second internet connection, which is relatively high in the US (relatively low compared to residential bandwidth available in, say, Korea), it'd take you 16 billion seconds, or 266 million minutes, or 507 years to transmit the data."

Thus supporting his contention that it is "faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet." Cool, huh?

From DPM to Ops Manager

Jeanie Decker — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:22:00 GMT

If you read this in an RSS feed, you won't have seen that my blog description has changed -- I'm moving from the Data Protection Manager (DPM) team to the Operations Manager team, focusing on management packs.

This opens up a whole new world of stuff for me to blog about. I need to learn things like: what makes a good management pack? What makes a good management pack guide? How do administrators use the management pack guides? If you have any thoughts on these questions, please drop me a line at mpgfeed(AT)microsoft.com.

If you read this blog primarily for DPM information, the DPM posts will still be available by clicking the System Center Data Protection Manager tag, and of course the DPM product team's blog is a great resource.

Installing DPM 2007

Jeanie Decker — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:22:00 GMT

Check out The Sean Blog for a step-by-step report on installing DPM 2007, with illustrations!

Web vs. print challenges

Jeanie Decker — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:12:00 GMT

If you took a look at the DPM 2007 Operations Guide during the beta, you might have noticed that the server chapters have a similar organization:

general maintenance
management
data recovery

And within those sections are parallel topics, such as:

renaming the server
applying OS updates
using Windows maintenance tools

A few times I've questioned whether it would be better to promote the topics and demote the server types:

Server prominent	Topic prominent
Exchange Servers General maintenance Using Windows maintenance tools	General maintenance Using Windows maintenance tools Exchange Servers

I go back and forth on the final organization. But based on conversations with customers, I decided to go with the server-centric organization - thus, a DPM admin who is working with protection of SharePoint servers can find all of the operations content in a single SharePoint section, even if some of that content is the same as in the SQL section or the file server section.

But what I'm considering doing is adding a new section that promotes the topic, as in the table above, so "Exchange & Windows maintenance tools" has two homes. If you're browsing the TechCenter navigation tree, looking for guidance on using chkdsk on a protected Exchange server, you could then find it by going in through the Maintenance node or by going in through the Exchange node.

If I do that and you download the final Operations Guide as a file, it would contain an awful lot of redundancies. But if I optimize for file format, that's really not effective for the discoverability and navigation challenges of the web presentation. So I figured if I wrote it up for this blog, I'd reach a final decision by the time I got to this point.

I'm thinking about it...

More from Jul 31 chat session

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:24:00 GMT

Here are a few more questions-and-answers from last week's DPM 2007 chat session, starting with a very popular question that comes up in the newsgroup frequently:

Q: [I'd like to use USB disk instead of tape for offsite and long term archival... will this be in DPM 2007, or is Tape still my only option for moving data outside the DPM pool?
A: We have a partner solution (Cristalink's Firestreamer) that works with DPM and will allow DPM to backup to a USB disk. This works with Beta2 itself. The partner page has more details on this.
Data Protection Manager Partners page
Q: I see DPM already comes with ese.dll. Yet its dialogs ask that I copy over both ese.dll and eseutil.exe for Exchange to DPM. Why is ese.dll already in place in DPM? Should I delete it?
A: The RTM version of DPM will not come with ese.dll. Please do delete the existing versions and then copy the latest version from the Exchange server.
Q: If the DPM server seems to be reasonably idle most of the time can it host other Server applications for small businesses with limited equipment resources or does it have to be dedicated to just backup?
A: We typically recommend a dedicated DPM server as it is known to have some interop issues with other roles like Domain Controller or Sharepoint. It has been tested as a standalone server but we know some customers to run some file/print workloads on the same server.

DPM 2007 chat session

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:12:00 GMT

It was great to "see" so many of you at this morning's chat on DPM 2007 - the room peaked at 90 people, although the gentleman with the Vista question doesn't really count. There was a nice variety of questions. I collected them so we can make sure the documentation addresses the issues people are interested in. I expect there'll be a transcript of the chat session posted later. In the meantime, here's a sample of today's Q&As...

Q: When will the DPM be available for purchase?
A: It will be available in the last quarter of 2007.
Q: After adding a job to backup an SQL database, how do you modify the backup schedule?
A: You need to go to the Protection pane, select the Protected group and modify protection group. This will launch the same wizard that you used to create the protection group. You can then modify the schedules as required.
Q: how is it possible to use a SQL Server instance for DPM from a remote server. We have lots of customers with consolidated SQL Servers and they dont want to install an additional SQL Server Instance for DPM
A: During the setup of DPM, you can specify to use an existing SQL instance. The SQL instance has to be named Microsoft$DPM$. The step by step guide is covered in the setup documentation.
Q: What does DPM backup in a VHD file? The whole thing or just elements within it (like Exchange and SQL)?
A: if you protect the data within the guest, then you can protect the individual data sources. for this you need to install the DPM agent on the GUEST itself. however, if you want, you can protect the VMs themselves by installing the agent on the HOST. in this case, the entire VM will be protected. Note that DPM will only perform block level (changes) backups for the VMs.

DPM 2007: new script repository

Jeanie Decker — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Adding PowerShell integration to this version of DPM is a big plus -- you can use DPM Management Shell to manage multiple DPM servers simultaneously, script oft-performed tasks, even do a few things that you can't do in the UI (such as removing recovery points). The product development team presents and discusses useful scripts on their blog, so you can use them to tailor to your own environment. And now these scripts will also be available on the Script Center, in the DPM script repository. Bookmark that page!

DPM 2007 and the storage pool

Jeanie Decker — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:33:00 GMT

If you're familiar with DPM 2006, adding disks to the storage pool in DPM 2007 might be confusing because it doesn't behave the way you expect. You're not alone - a lot of you using the beta 2 version of DPM 2007 have run into this. So here's an explanation of DPM 2007 and the storage pool disks.

In DPM 2006, disks added to the DPM storage pool are reformatted and, if necessary, converted to dynamic disks. DPM 2006 uses all space on the disk in the storage pool.

In DPM 2007, DPM uses only unallocated space on disks added to the storage pool. If you add a disk to the DPM 2007 storage pool that has existing volumes on it, DPM cannot use the space in the existing volumes. To make an entire disk available to the storage pool, delete all existing volumes from the disk before you add it to the storage pool.

DPM 2007 chat session

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:29:00 GMT

There will be a chat session on July 31, at 8:00 a.m. (pacific time) to discuss DPM 2007, formerly referred to as V2. This is a great opportunity to get your questions answered, hope to "see" you there!

"Get Ready for Data Protection Manager 2007 beta 2"

More DPM blogs

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:11:00 GMT

Check out Jason's World, a new blog on DPM (and anything else Jason decides to write about).

In addition, two of our Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners are posting about their experiences with DPM on their blogs: DPMFAQ.COM and My Spot on the Internet.

Enjoy!

Finding VSS-aware apps on your server

Jeanie Decker — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 01:01:00 GMT

Did you catch the webcast on protecting Virtual Server with DPM? I watched the replay this afternoon and learned a new trick from Allen Stewart (who gives a really excellent presentation, btw).

How to identify VSS-aware apps on Windows Server 2003: at a command prompt, type vssadmin list writers. He mentions it in the context of explaining how VSS writers works. Of course I immediately had to pause and try it - found 10 writers on my server. I don't often have a need to look for VSS writers ("not often" = "never") but hey, I got to learn something new!

DPM 2007: protecting Virtual Server

Jeanie Decker — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:23:00 GMT

Another interesting webcast coming up that you won't want to miss: "Microsoft Virtual Server and Data Protection Manager Install and Configure Walk-through". Register at the events website. The presentation will also be available for replay later, but try to make it to the live version so you can get your questions answered!

For your calendar: Thursday, June 21, 8:00 A.M. Pacific (US & Canada)

By the way, if you received notification of this webcast by email from Connect, the date in the email (6/20) is incorrect -- the correct date is 6/21.

DPM 2007: compatible tape libraries

Jeanie Decker — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:15:00 GMT

As you may know, DPM 2007 adds support for tape to DPM 2006's disk-based protection. So with DPM 2007, you can configure protection disk-to-disk, disk-to-tape, or disk-to-disk-to-tape. But an important question you'll have is, will DPM work with my existing tape library? Or, what tape library should I get to work with DPM?

For your answer, take a look at the list of tape libraries that have been tested and found compatible with DPM so far. Keep in mind that just because a tape library is not listed there, it does not mean that it is not compatible--only that it has not yet been tested.

Upgrading WSS 2.0 to 3.0, & DPM

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:01:00 GMT

Stefan Gossner posts about running PRESCAN.EXE against a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 database before upgrading it to WSS 3.0, and also provides a link to download the tool so you can run it ahead of time.

What does this have to do with DPM? Well, if you're using DPM 2007 Beta 2, you can protect WSS 2.0 databases as SQL Server databases. However, if you upgrade WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0, you need to reconfigure protection of the data as Windows SharePoint Services data.

The procedure (which is also documented in the DPM 2007 Operations Guide, in the chapter "Managing Protected Servers Running Windows SharePoint Services", available in the download section of the Connect site) is as follows:

Create a recovery point of the WSS 2.0 data that is protected as a SQL Server database.
Stop protection of the data, choosing the Retain replica option.
Upgrade the server running Windows SharePoint Services.
Add the upgraded Windows SharePoint Services farm to a protection group by selecting it as a Windows SharePoint Services data source.
Data in the retained replica remains available for recovery, but it is not associated with the upgraded Windows SharePoint Services farm.

DPM 2007 Beta 2 and laptop protection

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:40:00 GMT

One of the features we added to DPM 2007 is protection of desktop computers (those running Windows XP Professional SP2 or any edition of Vista except Home). But we also say in our documentation, "DPM does not support file protection on laptops...", and that has raised a few questions.

Technically, can you install the DPM protection agent on a laptop running XP or Vista? Yes. Technically, can you select data on the laptop with that agent as a protection group member? Yes.

Why isn't it supported then? Let me quote Karandeep from our newsgroup:

"You can install the DPM agent and protect it but you need to watch the following:

The notebook/laptop is connected to the domain and is on the network often enough for it to get backed up.
The bandwidth available between the DPM server and the notebook is sufficient to complete a backup (unreliable wireless connections are not recommended).
You'll see a lot of noise about failed backups in case the notebooks are not "well connected".
Based on these considerations, we don't recommend backing up machines which are not frequently connected to the network i.e. laptops/notebooks."