System Center

A deeper look into dBeamer!DPM for DPM 2010

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dBeamer!DPM is a third party tool that is added to your DPM to extend its functionality. dBeamer!DPM was made by a company called Instavia Software Inc. Instavia creates virtualization and availability tools. dBeamer!DPM can be used to add your DPM as a part of your High Availability (HA) infrastructure by increasing your RTO to near 0. dBeamer!DPM allows you to recover data even if your DPM services or DPM database is down and gives you the ability for the data to be used the minute it starts being restored.

We are going to take a look at dBeamer!DPM its capabilities and how to get this working with DPM. We are also going to test accessing a Hyper-V virtual machine while the virtual machine is being restored from DPM using dBeamer!DPM.

AT A GLANCE:

  • Overview of dBeamer
    • Overview of the technology behind dBeamer, what it does and how it works.
  • Overview of dBeamer!DPM.
  • Deployment of dBeamer!DPM
    • dBeamer!DPM install on DPM Server.
    • dBeamer install on a Protected Server.

  • Real world dBeamer!DPM test
    • Test recovery of Hyper-V virtual machine and use while it is running.

Overview of dBeamer

dBeamer is the technology underneath dBeamer!DPM. dBeamer uses an operation called BEAM that allows you to copy data such as files, folders, virtual machines and database to a different location and this data is made available instantly. Another example is that you could start a BEAM of a video and begin playing it while it is still copying over. So for example a user could start reading or modifying Microsoft Word documents or a live database while the data is still being copied. dBeamer BEAM technology works regardless of the size of data that you are copying.

dBeamer has a pause and resume operation to head of loss of data during a BEAM. For example if data is being beamed over a network and network connectivity is lost dBeamer will pause and then resume when connectivity is restored. dBeamer is integrated right into Microsoft windows through a windows explorer extension. dBeamer also has a scripting and command line tool so that you can automate the initiation of a BEAM operation.

You can start the dBeamer BEAM operation one of three ways:

1. Beaming right from Windows Explorer

2. Beaming from command shell

3. Using the dBeamer application itself

dBeamer runs on NTFS and requires 4GB RAM minimum to run. dBeamer uses a large amount of RAM to perform the BEAM operations and that is why there is a requirement of at least 4GB of ram. The more RAM that is allocated on machines that are beaming the better performance you will get. dBeamer is supported on these following operating systems:

· Windows 2003 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2003 R2 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2008 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2008 R2 (x64)

· Windows 7 (x86 and x64)

Enough about dBeamer itself let’s look at how this technology actually works. This is what happens when dBeamer performs a BEAM operation:

Step 1: A BEAM is initiated to copy data from one location to another.

Step 2: dBeamer creates a virtual local file view of the data that is being beamed on the destination.

Step 3: Once the virtual local file is completely created in the destination it can immediately be used.

Step 4: On the destination when portions of the data that is being Beamed is needed dBeamer then fetches the needed data blocks on demand allowing for continues access of data that has not even been transferred yet.

Step 5: dBeamer continues to simultaneously copy the data content in a sequential fashion without overwriting the modified contents of the virtual local file, once the BEAM is complete dBeamer stops and the data in the destination is completely beamed over as a whole.

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Backing up Applications with DPM

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We all know that DPM can protect basic Windows Servers 2003 through 2008 R2 including files, folders, and critical server components like system state and do BMR’s of servers. DPM can also protect Windows application specific workloads. I often see confusion or questions in forums about the applications that can be protected natively by DPM. In this post I will set out to list the applications DPM protects natively and list resources to other common applications and where to get the information on properly backing them up.

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Protecting SharePoint 2010 with DPM 2010

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Original Post: http://sharepoint.mindsharpblogs.com/steve/archive/2011/06/02/Protecting-SharePoint-2010-with-DPM-2010.aspx

DPM 2010 is an optimal backup/restore application for SharePoint 2010. Here are a few reasons why DPM is a good solution for protecting SharePoint 2010:

  • DPM is aware that it’s backing up SharePoint. This means it knows about all the transactions that are occurring during backup and therefore you get a more consistent backup of the data.
  • DPM can protect SharePoint search.
  • Automatically protect new content databases when added to your SharePoint farm.
  • DPM is light with low I/O when it is backing up SharePoint getting only the changes during protection meaning your production environment will not take a performance hit.
  • DPM will let you perform item level restores of SharePoint objects such as SharePoint sites, documents, lists, and other objects.
  • One of the best reasons is that with the release of SharePoint 2010 a recovery farm is no longer required to perform restores, DPM 2010 takes full advantage of this feature so that you can perform a restore without a recovery farm right from DPM to your SharePoint.

Lets take a look at how you would start Protecting SharePoint 2010 with DPM 2010. Before you can backup SharePoint with DPM the configurations and prerequisites have to be met. We are going to cover these requirements as well as the steps to protect your SharePoint environments.

Here are the steps to start protecting your SharePoint environment.

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Migrating from DPM 2007 to DPM 2010

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Original Article: http://www.packtpub.com/article/installing-data-protection-manager-2010

With the DPM upgrade you will face some of the same issues as with the installation such as what are the prerequisites? is your operating system patched? and is DPM 2007 fully patched and ready for the upgrade? This article will walk you through each step of the DPM installation process during the first half and the DPM 2007 to DPM 2010 upgrade in the second half. After reading this article you should know what to look for when working through the prerequisites and requirements.

Migrating from DPM 2007 to DPM 2010

Microsoft has released an upgrade adviser tool for upgrading from DPM 2007 to DPM 2010. You will need to run this to see if your current DPM 2007 is ready for the upgrade. This is a tool that asks you a series of questions and it will give you the recommended steps to take in order to upgrade your DPM from 2007 to 2010. This tool is an excel file and can be downloaded at the following page:

Here are what the questions are and what the tool looks like:

Installing Data Protection Manager 2010

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Installing Data Protection Manager 2010

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Original Article: http://www.packtpub.com/article/installing-data-protection-manager-2010

Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 is a backup and recovery solution which provides continuous data protection for Windows application and file servers to seamlessly integrated disk, tape, and cloud.

The DPM installation as well as the upgrade process is pretty straightforward. The areas where the DPM installation can get tricky are prerequisites, hardware and software requirements, as well as making sure your operating system is properly updated and patched. All of these things need to be met or completed before you can start the DPM installation.

In this article by Steve Buchanan, author of Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010, shall cover the following topics:

  • Installing DPM
  • Installing Single Instance Store (SIS)
  • Installing DPM (on a local or remote SQL instance)

Prerequisites

In this section we will jump right into the prerequisites for DPM and how to install them as well as the two different ways to install DPM. We will first visit the hardware and software requirements, and a pre-install that is needed before you are able to actually install DPM 2010.

Hardware requirements

DPM 2010 requires a processor of 1 GHz (dual-core or faster), 4 GB of RAM or higher, the page file should be set to 1.5 or 2 times the amount of RAM on the computer. The DPM disk space requirements are as follows:

  • DPM installation location needs 3 GB free
  • Database file drive needs 900 MB free
  • System drive needs 1 GB free
  • Disk space for protected data should be 2.5 to 3 times the size of the protected data

DPM also needs to be on a dedicated, single purpose computer.

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System Center Center Essentials 2010: Cannot initialize report.

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When trying to access “Essentials Reports” in System Center Essentials (SCE) reporting you get this error: Cannot initialize report. This error is because your System Center “Run As” account does not have SQL select permission on the SUSDB database. To fix this you simply need to give this account the proper permission. To do this … Read more

Hot off the Press: Data Protection Manager 2010

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— Packt Publishing released my book on Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 today. Who’s it for? If you are a Network Administrator, System Administrator, Backup Administrator, Storage Administrator or IT consultant who wants to effectively back up your business data using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010, then this book is for you. What’s it about? … Read more

Allow DPM Traffic Through ISA 2006 / TMG 2010

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In this post I will explain the steps I had to take to allow DPM traffic in and out of my ISA firewall. (NOTE: This will also work with TMG 2010). This is required in order for a Secondary offsite DPM server to backup a Primary DPM server that is inside the local network and for client protection over the WAN. Both DPM offsite protection and offsite client protection are done via VPN. Configuring ISA / TMG for DPM traffic can seem somewhat complex and there is not any really good documentation on how to do this. My goal of this post is to simply this process as much as possible in clear easy to follow steps. I will assume that if you are reading this post that you are somewhat familiar with ISA 2006 / TMG 2010.

The steps needed to configure ISA 2006/TMG 2010 to allow DPM traffic in and out of the network are:

  1. Configure an access rule for DPM traffic.
  2. Define protocols in ISA/TMG for DPM traffic.
  3. Unrestrict RPC security.

1. Configure an access rule for DPM traffic.

You first need to create an Access rule in ISA 2006 for DPM. I called mine DPM offsite.

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In the rule allow access to and from Internal, Local Host, and VPN Clients. We will add the protocols next.

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Building Custom Reports in DPM

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The Need:

You need to get detailed reports on your Data Protection Manager. The reports that are included with DPM are not enough and do not contain the data that you need to report on.

The Solution:

There is a way to create custom reports for DPM. I am not a SQL guy and will never claim to be but I was still able to figure out how to generate custom reports for DPM thanks to Microsoft SQL reporting services. Let’s cover the process of doing this.

The DPM Report Views

Views are like tables in SQL in the way they look. Views can be considered virtual tables that pull data from multiple tables. They dynamically generate their data when the view is referenced. Someone typically will build a view for non-SQL users that do not know how to write SQL queries but need to pull data together.

Microsoft has included a bunch of SQL views in the DPM database by default. They included these so that DPM administrators could create custom reports. These Custom Report Views for DPM can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399120.aspx . On that link it will also describe what type of data each view will give you in your report. This is what the views look like and where they are stored in SQL management studio.

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These views need to be used by SQL Reporting Services to generate the custom DPM reports.

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