In this fourth and last part of this DPM 2012 review series we’ll look at a new authentication mechanism for servers in untrusted domains or workgroups and we look at some improvements that should be added to DPM and conclude the series with some overall comments.

DPM 2010 provides the ability to protect servers in workgroup or non-trusted domains, using local accounts and NTLM based authentication. This capability proved less than popular in large enterprises because of the inherent weakness in NTLM, auditing difficulties and local account management. DPM 2012 adds another authentication method (the previous capabilities are still available); certificate based authentication. The following workloads are supported; SQL Server, File Server, Hyper-V and these can be clustered as well as standalone (note the missing pieces here, no Exchange, SharePoint, System State / Bare Metal Recovery or client computers). A secondary DPM server for DR can also use this authentication method.

All protection in DPM is done around the concept of Protection Groups.

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In this third part of the review of Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2012 we’ll cover a host of different improvements such as Item Level Recovery (ILR) from host level backups even when DPM is installed as a VM, ILR improvements for SharePoint recoveries and tape co-location enhancements.

In a virtualized environment the issue is whether to backup from inside the guest or from the host. The latter provides “bare metal restore” of an entire VM where something’s gone catastrophically wrong with a VM (or the host) but in general it doesn’t provide granular restore of files / folders. DPM 2010 added Item Level Restore (ILR), allowing you to restore individual files or folders within a VM even though it had only been backed up from the host. But this capability was only available when DPM 2010 ran on physical hardware, if the DPM server itself was in a VM this capability was not available. DPM 2012 fixes this glitch and can now do ILR even when the DPM server is a VM.

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In this second part of this four part series reviewing DPM 2012 we’ll look at the new Role Based Access feature and dive into the scoped DPM console.

The scoped DPM console

The Central Console also enables another nifty troubleshooting feature – the scoped DPM console. When an alert is raised in SCOM you can click the Troubleshoot button which will take you to a DPM console which only shows the data sources, backup jobs and agents that are affected by this particular issue. Even better, once you have resolved the underlying cause you can run a test backup with a single click before resuming the entire backup job. It also provides context; the ticket number, alert and DPM server is listed in an area at the top of the scoped console.

Centralizing management inside of SCOM doesn’t just mean an aggregated view of all backups across many DPM servers; it also lets you work on more important issues first, for instance by showing issues that affect multiple data sources. Segregating errors into infrastructure and backup failures enables Tier 1 or 2 support to focus on backup failure alerts, whereas Backup Admins work on infrastructure problems and Tape Admins focus on tape errors.

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In this first part of this four part series on Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2012 I cover the installation as well as the new Centralized Console.

Introduction

Protecting your data and systems running Microsoft workloads is paramount and the best way to do that is with Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). This is an enterprise class product that’s gone from strength to strength over the last few versions. In this review we’ll look at DPM 2012 Release Candidate.

DPM 2012

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In the previous three posts in this series, I discussed how to be proactive and what to do when faced with the possibility of legal inquiry. Part 4 will focus on the steps necessary to restore a mailbox database from Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) and prepare it for search.

If your inquiry will be done on a live database, this step of the process is not necessary. However; there are several scenarios where you’d want to perform the inquiry on a snapshot of the mailbox database from a previous point in time.

Exchange 2007

Create Recovery Storage Group

The first step is to use the Database Recovery Assistant to create a recovery storage group. This will provide a place to restore the database from DPM.

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Paul Schnackenburg talks to Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft and Frederique Dennison, Product Marketing Manager – Security and Management at Microsoft about the Systems Center Suite, Systems Center Configuration Manager vNext, Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Disaster Recovery and backup over the wire, small business backup and the Tech Ed Australia 2010 experience.

PS Congratulations on becoming Technical Product Manager for Systems Center Operations Manager, you’re sort of straddling three products now. That would be a pretty big load?

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SP1 for DPM 2007 has some interesting features. Most important is probably Hyper-V support. It is now available for download:

DPM 2007 SP1 (32bit)

DPM 2007 SP1 (64bit)

And here some more useful links:

What’s New in DPM 2007 Service Pack 1

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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

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Data Protection Manager 2007 RC is finally out. I have been waiting for this already for some time. Just some days ago, we had a serious problem with our current backup solution, Symantec Backup Exec. We didn’t renew our service contract with Symantec because I am seriously considering moving to DPM 2007.

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Jason Buffington, the “Data Protection Guy” at Microsoft explains the difference between DPM 2006 and DPM 2007 (Data Protection Manager) with respect to continuous data protection. Whereas DPM 2006 uses a file system filter “to grab a copy of the file operation”, DPM 2007 uses a VSS writer (Volume Shadow Copy Service) instead.

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I was quite surprised when someone from Microsoft told me that DPM v2 Beta 1 not only allows backups of Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint, but also supports tape libraries. This would make DPM v2 a serious competitor to backup tools like Symantec Backup Exec or CA ARCserve. It made me quite curious to try DPM v2. Microsoft’s latest CDP solution certainly is an interesting backup tool. However, Beta 1 has one major shortcoming.

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Service Pack 1 for DPM 2006 is now available. It is interesting that SP1 was released after the beta for Version 2. I didn’t test yet DPM 2006 Version 2, but it is still on my to-do-list. The new features of DPM 2006 SP1 might be of interest for you, if you already work with Microsoft’s backup software:

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I was quite surprised when I found out about this today. I didn’t expect that Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) will support backups of Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server before 2008. I tested DPM 2006 thoroughly and wrote an article about it in the German print magazine iX. Although I like Microsoft’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solution, I found several shortcomings.

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Yesterday, I discussed the Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager’s (DPM) advantages over traditional disk-based backup software. However, DPM also has some disadvantages. Some of these shortcomings are related to the fact that DPM is a CDP solution; or to the fact that it is just version 1.0.

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This article is part of the series about continuous data protection (CDP). In the first article I introduced the concept of CDP. I recommend reading the article first, before you continue. This article discusses Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2006 as one example of a CDP system. Today, I will focus on its advantages over traditional disk-based backup systems. In the next article of this series I will talk about the disadvantages. I recently published an article about the DPM in the German magazine iX. My German readers can get the complete review there.

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