Some days ago, the IT forum published a presentation from Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager for storage solutions at Microsoft, about the new features of Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1. The video also introduces DPM 2007 and the recently released Feature Pack. The most interesting part is certainly about the enhancement that SP1 will bring. I copied here the main parts of the presentation:

SQL Server backup

• SQL Server 2008 Protection for mirrored databases now includes backup on failover
• Ability to backup databases in parallel within same instance

SharePoint 2007 backup

• Index and catalog protection within SharePoint setup, increased of manual inclusion
• Unified protection of mirrored SQL databases within SharePoint farm

Hyper-V backup

• New Hyper-V VSS writer enables online backup of guests with DPM 2007 SP1
• Local Data source backup
• DPM can now protect its own file shares and virtualization guests for branch office solution

General Enhancements

• Support for Cross-Forest protection
• Scale and Performance Enhancements

Note that in the diagram the text in yellow is not only about the new features in SP1, but also includes the features that are already available with the Feature Pack. Some bloggers misunderstood that.

In my opinion, Hyper-V support is the most important new feature. One of the biggest advantages of server virtualization is that it enables you to move VMs to another host in case of a hardware malfunction. However, if you can’t afford a fancy Live Migration environment (supported in Windows Server 2008 R2), continuous data protection might be another option. In case of a hardware failure, you can restore a relatively fresh backup to another host.

Microsoft is a bit late, though. Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 already supports Hyper-V backups. However, I am not sure whether the Hyper-V agent also supports continuous protection. Please let me know, if you know more about this.