System Center Data Protection Manager CSV Serialization Tool

This tool is mostly interesting for people trying to back-up Windows 2008 R2 CSV.

The back-up of Windows Server 2008 R2 CSV van be tricky. It is recommended to use a hardware snapshot provider. If there is no hardware provider available then you need to switch to serial CSV back-ups.

This process creates an XML file that is read by DPM.  This works well when you have only a couple of Hyper-V servers to manage.  But what if you had lots of clusters backed up by a single DPM server?  With the current approach, if there are multiple clusters managed by DPM, the user needs to run DSConfig.ps1 on one node of each cluster and then XMLs of each cluster needs to be merged and replace the DataSources.xml

Microsoft has released the System Center Data Protection Manager CSV Serialization Tool to help you in this scenario.  This tool is intended to be used when backing up Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V clusters with one or more CSVs using DPM 2010 with QFE 3 and above or DPM 2012.

Read more at Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Instant recovery of Hyper-V and other DPM data

Another post from my CFIT colleague Marcel van den Berg. This time about dBeamerDPM an add-on for DPM that allows IT administrators to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of near zero by an instantly recovery  from a Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). Other usage cases for dBeamerDPM are instant setup of a test environment.

For more info read his post Instant recovery of Hyper-V virtual machines and other DPM data

DPM 2010 Storage Calculators

Storage is the most essential part of the hardware for Data protection Manager. In most cases you will use disk for your short term protection.

But how many disk space to you need?
To answer this question Microsoft has developed three Excel calculation sheets (still in draft) for: Exchange, SharePoint and Hyper-V

Example 1: Hyper-V Calculation

Example 2: Exchange Protection

Example 3: SharePoint protection

As you can see in the examples above, the sheets calculate more then only the required disk space. It also calculate the number of DPM servers required, hardware for DPM server needed. Configuration of the DPM server; like page file and Database size. You will also find an estimated backup and recovery time for your protected servers.

The sheets are available at the Microsoft download site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c136c66c-bd4a-4fb1-8088-f610cd02dc51

DPM 2007 Configuration Analyzer

DPM Configuration Analyzer is a diagnostic tool that verifies configuration settings on your Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

The DPM Configuration Analyzer (DPMCA) is a diagnostic tool you can use to evaluate important configuration settings on DPM 2007 servers. The tool scans hardware and software configurations of the DPM servers you specify, evaluates them against a set of predefined rules, and provides you with best practice suggestions that can make your DPM experience more optimal.

More on: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=54b4bb57-d6e3-4c1e-a889-a24cfa18fcd4&displaylang=en#Instructions

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Volume Sizing Tool

.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=445bc0cd-fc93-480d-98f0-3a5fb05d18d0&DisplayLang=en#filelist

Long Term Protection without Tape drive

Firestreamer is a software utility that enables the existing tape backup software to directly access a wide range of non-tape storage media, eliminating the need for tape drives. Firestreamer can use HDD, Blu-ray, DVD, Iomega REV, network file systems and other types of media as underlying storage, exposing the pieces of media as virtual tape cartridges.





The Tape drives emulated by Firestreamer are supported by DPM 2007, this way you can make a long-term protection back-up to USB* or other portable media.

*by default DPM 2007 does not support USB-drives