Your Computer Network Solution
New Look: Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
Microsoft has just released to manufacturing (RTM) System Center Data Protection Manager 2010. This is the 3rd generation of this product and we wanted to take a look under the hood of Microsoft’s data protection system.
As you may know, we have been involved with Data Protection Manager (DPM) since the product was in beta back in early 2006. At the time, Microsoft wanted to develop an enterprise disk-based backup system that they could use to protect Microsoft’s own network. The product had two game changing attributes: it could backup live systems in near real time, and secondly, it could backup systems remotely across an Internet connection. Prior to DPM, most backup solutions involved tape media.
As SATA disk drives started to become prevalent and the cost of storage kept declining at a rapidly increasing pace, the concept of disk-to-disk backup had become a reality. One challenge remained, however. We still had to address the need of an off-site backup in case of a disaster. With DPM’s ability to backup servers remotely, this became a real possibility.
Soon, we deployed DPM 2006 within our internal ICS network and took snapshots of the DPM data off site for disaster recovery. Early results were mixed however, as DPM 2006 had some bugs. Servers would occasionally stop backing up and replications would fail. Storage allocations would fill up and require manual expansion. Rarely did it take more than a restart to resolve an issue, but it needed frequent attention.
Microsoft responded by coming out with service pack 1 for DPM 2006 and soon after, DPM 2007. This was a significant improvement. Improvements to VSS (Virtual Storage Services) made it possible to backup Microsoft Exchange and SQL server in almost real time. Furthermore, improvements in replication made DPM to DPM a viable possibility. Now we could locate off premise DPM servers that would replicate a local DPM server to provide true disaster recovery capabilities. We’ve been using DPM 2007 SP1 for a couple of years now to protect all 13 internal servers at ICS Support.
So what’s new in DPM 2010 that’s compelling? In a word…LOTS!
First off, it works with Windows Server 2008 R2 out of the box. Unlike previous versions, getting it to install on 2008 is a piece of homemade fudge brownie. DPM has traditionally been a difficult install. Not with 2010. A base 2008 R2 server install works fine. All prerequisite software is loaded automatically during the standard install process. Getting a DPM server up and running is rather straight forward.
At first look, the user interface for DPM 2010 looks very much like 2007. You start out by clicking the Management tab and then add disks under the disk tab. Adding disks is a simple matter of pointing to raw drives. DPM manages the entire partition process. DPM storage drives will not appear under the Windows OS as local resources. Once storage has been added, you can deploy agents on remote servers under the Agents tab. Most servers were easy to install; however, we did come across a few that failed to install the first couple of attempts. Opening the firewall (Domain properties) resolved these issues and agents deployed as expected. From there, you can add protection groups that are configured to protect data for specific servers.
Perhaps the most significant addition/improvement to DPM 2010 is how it handles backing up Virtual Servers. As we have four Microsoft Hyper-V servers running more than a dozen virtual servers in house, the ability to protect an entire virtual machine with a click of a mouse is truly impressive. The virtual guests are protected in real time, without being shut down or even paused. Microsoft’s DPM and Hyper V engineering teams worked together to make both VSS engines work seamlessly together.
Recovering a VM from one physical server to another is simple. All you need to do is to recover the VHD files to a network share where they can be accessed by another host and up the machine comes. Nothing could be easier.
This alone will make virtualization even more attractive. Keep in mind, it’s easy to configure a pair of DPM servers to replicate across the VPN. Having an entire virtual server replicated at an off-site data center provides great disaster recovery capabilities.
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After about two weeks with the product, I am very pleased with how we are protecting our virtual servers. In some cases, we are backing up the individual server data as a standard client in addition to protecting the VHD files themselves. While this appears to be redundant, having both disk level and file level backup provides a good degree of certainty that we can recover any data we might need.
For information on DPM 2010 and how it might be used in your environment, please contact Chris Faist, Integrated Computer Systems Support, at 425-284-5410.
