DPM 2007: Set It Up and Get Started

Setting Up Protection Groups
The final step is to create a protection group for the computers that you want to protect. You create protection groups via the Protection area of the Administrator Console. Click Create protection group in the Actions pane to launch the Create New Protection Group Wizard, and you’re shown a list of all the servers that have the DPM agent installed. As Figure 5 shows, you can see the volumes, shares, and application-specific protectable units, such as Exchange storage groups, VM instances, and SQL Server databases. You can restore smaller units than these, but for establishing protection, you have quite broad options, which basically tie in to the methods the application-specific VSS writers supply.

After you select the data to protect, you’re prompted for how to protect it—for example, to disk, to disk and tape. Specific applications give you additional protection options; for example, when protecting Exchange stores, you can choose to run Eseutil on the DPM copy of data to ensure data integrity, but you’ll need to be sure to copy the required files to the DPM server. As Figure 6 shows, if you select an option without the appropriate prerequisites installed, DPM warns you and provides full information as to the exact files required and where to copy them.

With disk-based protection, you need to specify retention options for protected data, which by default is five days. Then you specify how often data should be synchronized to the DPM server; what you choose here will vary based on what data you’re protecting. For example, with Exchange and SQL Server, by default transaction-based data (i.e., transaction logs) is synced to the DPM server every 15 minutes, but you can change the interval to as long as once every 24 hours. You also set how often DPM performs an express full backup, which, remember, sends only changes since the last backup.

If you’re protecting file-based data, you can select how often to sync changes and how often you want to create file recovery points, which is performed three times a day by default. Recovery points are the times that will be available to clients to select point-in-time views of file resources. I’ll cover the different ways data is captured in more detail in “DPM 2007: Protecting and Restoring Data,” available in November on windowsitpro.com. After you’ve made these selections, the wizard informs you of the amount of disk space required for the selected members and the amount of space that will be allocated.

If you have tape drives attached, you can configure your long-term recovery goals by setting how many weeks, months, or years of data you want to keep and how often you want to create tape-based backups; the default backup period is weekly. You also need to specify which tape library to use as well as compression and encryption options.

Finally, you can select how the data is transferred from the member server to the DPM server for the initial replica. Typically, this replica is copied immediately over the network, but you can configure this copy to be performed later or you can elect to manually copy the data over via removable media if you have a large amount of data.

You now have protected information via DPM 2007!

A Versatile Solution
You might be worried about having a single central DPM server responsible for all of your data protection. What happens if you lose your DPM server? The answer is to use another DPM server. You can configure a second DPM server to protect the primary DPM server. For instance, you could have a DPM server in Dallas collecting data from all your servers in Dallas. You can have another DPM server in Orlando that’s configured to protect the DPM server in Dallas. All the protected data on the Dallas DPM server is sent to the Orlando DPM server—and the even better news is that the Orlando DPM data maintains the same formatting as the original Dallas data. Therefore, you can restore data from the Orlando DPM server directly to one of the protected Dallas servers; you don’t have to restore the Orlando backup to the Dallas DPM server first. You could even use disk-to-disk protection on the Dallas DPM server, then use disk-to-disk-to-tape protection on the Orlando DPM server, giving you offsite tape backups of the Dallas data. If you use a SAN for the original DPM storage location, you already have a highly available platform for your data, which is probably the best way to go if you have large amounts of data.

Microsoft has done a great job making DPM an automated and intuitive solution. You should now have a good grasp of the general DPM product and what’s involved in setting it up, which I think you’ll agree isn’t too difficult. In the next article, I’ll show you how to use DPM to protect specific types of data, namely Exchange and SQL Server, plus how to recover data with DPM, including end-user self-recovery and bare-metal recovery scenarios. I’ll also go into more detail about how data is copied over to the DPM server, using combinations of full backups and transaction-based transmissions.

For now, get DPM installed in your lab and start playing! Microsoft has trial versions available for download, and I think you’ll agree this is one cool solution. Now, if only they would just fix some of the Help files.