Installing DPM 2007
The DPM 2007 server runs on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003, with both x86 and x64 architectures supported; 64-bit is the recommended platform. The DPM server should be dedicated for DPM; you can’t install DPM on a domain controller or on any type of application or management server. In addition to the disk space requirements I mentioned earlier, if you’re setting up disk-to-disk protection, your DPM server should have at least 2GB of memory, and the pagefile size needs to be increased beyond the typical pagefile recommendations for a server, which is based on memory in the physical server, by 0.2 percent of the size of all protected data. For example, if you have 1TB of protected data, you should increase your pagefile size by 2GB (1TB = 1000GB, 0.2% × 1000GB = 2GB).
DPM uses a SQL Server database to store configuration and indexing information, and this database is the source of DPM reporting. This database can be installed either locally on the DPM server during DPM installation or on an existing SQL Server instance. If you choose to use a remote instance, you just give DPM the name of the SQL Server instance during installation and a set of credentials it can use to create a new database on that instance. The SQL Server instance that’s part of DPM is a standard edition of SQL Server 2005 SP2 embedded in the DPM 2007 media, but it’s locked down so that the database can be used only by DPM.
There are several prerequisites for Windows Server 2003 boxes, including a VSS rollup patch, and you need to download and install Windows PowerShell. These steps aren’t needed on Server 2008 because the VSS fix is part of the OS as is PowerShell—viva Windows Server 2008!
DPM installation is a simple process driven by a wizard that starts by performing prerequisites checks to ensure your system meets all requirements; if it detects problems, it displays the corrective action. As Figure 2 shows, DPM requires the Single Instance Store (SIS) component to ensure the most efficient storage of its content. If a required component isn’t installed, the wizard displays the command necessary to install it.
The rest of the setup wizard guides you through selecting a SQL Server instance or installing SQL Server locally, and it adds additional features and roles that are needed on the server, such as Microsoft IIS and PowerShell. The installation process can take some time because of the number of components potentially being installed, and when installation is complete you must reboot the server. The setup wizard displays a link to the main DPM page on Microsoft’s website where you can go to get updates for DPM.
Setting DPM Storage
When the installation is complete and you’ve rebooted the server, you need to provision the disk and tape devices that DPM will use. I’ll focus on adding disk resources because this is the most common form of protection with DPM. You manage DPM 2007 primarily via the Administrator Console, which is broken down into sections for Monitoring, Protection, Recovery, Reporting, and Management. You use the Management section to add target storage disks. DPM can use any disk that the OS considers a fixed disk, including dynamic disks. You can’t use USB- or Firewire-attached devices as storage areas for DPM. In addition, the volume that DPM is installed on can’t be used as storage for DPM. Remember, you don’t need to add any storage for DPM to use if you’re using the disk-to-tape topology.
As Figure 3 shows, any disks suitable for use by DPM are displayed on the Disks tab of the Management section. You simply select the disks you wish to use for DPM storage, click Add, then click OK. The selected disks are converted to dynamic disks, and any existing volumes are converted to simple volumes. The process for selecting tape drives is the same, but you select the Libraries tab and perform a Rescan action first, then the console displays any supported tape drives.
Deploying DPM Agents
You now have a deployed DPM server. You have storage configured for storing snapshots of protected data. The only thing you’re missing is a way to actually gather those snapshots. For that, you need to deploy the DPM agent to each server and location you want DPM to protect.
You can deploy the DPM agent in numerous ways because the agent is provided as a Windows Installer (.msi) file, found in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Agents folder of your DPM server. You can deploy the .msi file by using Group Policy or by using management products such as SCCM 2007 or SMS 2003. You can, of course, push the agent by using the Agents tab of the Administrator Console. Click Install in the Actions pane to launch the Protection Agent Installation Wizard, which displays a list of all computers in the domain. As Figure 4 shows, you can select multiple computers for agent deployment. Next, you’ll need to enter a set of credentials with permission to install software on the servers you selected, such as a domain administrator account. You also choose whether the servers should be automatically restarted; you have to reboot because you’re essentially injecting a filter driver into the file system stack.
I didn’t have much success installing agents with this method. Even after turning off the firewall entirely, the agent still didn’t push. Granted, I was trying to install onto Server 2008 boxes, and I found the Help files particularly unhelpful. The manual installation method using DPMAgentInstaller worked great, though!
There are two agents on the file system in RA and AC folders, which is because the DPM agent consists of two components, the actual protection agent (RA folder) and an agent coordinator (AC folder). However, you need to run only DPMAgentInstaller.exe from the RA folder (or DPMAgentInstaller_AMD64.exe for the 64-bit version). When you run the installer manually, you specify the DPM server name—although if you don’t, you can configure it later via the SetDpmServer.exe program that gets installed on the server. The following example shows the command to run the installer on a 64-bit client:
Z:\RA\2.0.5820.0\amd64>DPMAgentInstaller_AMD64.exe savdaldpm01.savilltech.net
This command installs the DPM protection agent and configures the firewall to allow DPM communication. After the servers are rebooted, you can connect them to your DPM server using PowerShell commands via DPM Management Shell, which you can access on the DPM server. Because the agent wasn’t pushed from DPM, this connection step is necessary so DPM knows the agent is deployed to the server. In the PowerShell command, you pass the name of the DPM server and the name of the server you installed the agent on, as follows:
.\Attach-ProductionServer.ps1 savdaldpm01.savilltech.net savdalsql01.savilltech.net
You can use this manual method of agent installation if you want to integrate the DPM agent into a server image. Just run DPMAgentInstaller on your reference machine, then capture the image. When you deploy the image to other servers, you’ll need to run the Attach-ProductionServer script on the DPM server and specify the names of the newly deployed servers.
Register
