Monday, May 25, 2009

Multiple protection group to one tape (Data Colocation)

In DPM 2007, one protection group to allocate in one tape.

However, DPM 2007 allows to collocate protection groups on a tape. Then, you can group recovery points of multiple protection groups on a single tape. This will save the tape if you have lots of protection group. This feature, called Data Colocation.

To enable and disable this feature, please download and install KB 949779 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=122329).

After install the update, you can then enable or disable data colocation using DPM Management Shell.

Set-DPMGlobalProperty -DPMServerName -OptimizeTapeUsage $True

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

DPM and SAN

Is there any benefits if you have your data in SAN and use a DPM to protect it? For sure it has.

Lets say you have Exchange data stored in a SAN, and you would like to protect using DPM. If your Exchange is running on CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication), you will be able to backup DPM from a passive node.

Few things for you to start with if you have a SAN:
(NOTE: you will want to ask from your SAN vendor about the features that you can use/supported using DPM)

1) Replica. As the first replica of your DB/Data, you can make use of the "clone", this will save your time and performance from getting the data from the original server through a network.

2) Recovery. You can make use of SAN based recovery in DPM. What this will do is, instead of recover through network, you make use of SAN based recovery, this will save your network bandwidth as well as time to recover.

DPM - data recovery

In one of our DPM deployment, there are some questions on the data recovery side of DPM. Just to share:

DPM created "point-in-time" copy of the replica during the set schedule (can be 15 mins, can be an hour, depending on your data type - files and folder is one hour and supported applications like Exchange and SQL is about 15 minutes). DPM will be able to maintains up to 64 recovery points for files/folders and 448 express full with 96 incremental backups!

So, if you calculate in detail, you have more than 300,000 recovery points in a year if you put your short term recovery to disk, or mix of disk and tape.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Control the location for SMSPKG$ share

SMS & SCCM distribution point by default will always look for the most free disk space drive and create the SMSPKG$ share resided on the drive. If you did not manage it properly, the SMSPKG$ share may exist on multiple drive and those shared content might content different package source and it is very hard for you to consolidate those content into single location.

Some of you may asking is that possible to dedicate a specific location and prevent the distribution point from creating the shared everywhere? Answer is Yes, we can do that. Below are the simple steps to accomplish the task:
  1. On the target drive (where you would like to store the distribution package), create a shared folder and grant permission for SCCM service account & machine account.
  2. In ConfigMgr console, browse to site system, then create a server share.
  3. Specify the server share as distribution point, and then remove the default distribution point (If you perform this in production envinronment, make sure you backup all your distribution packages first).
After the above action been done, you will notice that the SMSPKG$ will only create under the shared folder you specified.