John Quirk's Blog

As I’m all Hyper-V R2 for my demo environment I figure I may as well have a look at DPM 2010 Beta 1 than deploy the excellent DPM 2007 SP1 (there’s no Hyper-V R2 support in the current version).

I’ve created a new Server 2008 R2 x64 VM and downloaded the DPM beta.

I have also created a new LUN on my excellent Qnap TS-119 called “Backup”.

The iSCSI initiator on the new DMP VM connects to this:

Disk administrator wants me to initialize the disk:

Now I’m ready to give this disk to DPM. I don’t need to format it, DPM will manage that.

DPM’s setup routine is very attractive!

Oops, I’m not logged on with domain credentials. Also the Single Instance Storage engine isn’t installed. DPM setup will handle this, but it’ll need a reboot.

I’ve been lazily using the built in Administrator account to date, Windows has a minor irritation of thinking you want to log on locally when you type in “Administrator” and switches the logon context as you type, consequently you have to enter DOMAIN\Administrator every time. Perhaps it’s best if I create a new account, this also gives me chance to try out Windows Server 2008 R2 “Active Directory Administrative Center”

I don’t do a lot of support, but I can see that this thing would be a boon for account management types. No more multiple-dialogue-tab hell, just everything in a nice neat expandable list. You can remove the sections that you don’t use and get everything relevant in a great, easy to use view:

What’s not to like, this is great. The search is really quick and doesn’t suffer from the terrible user interface horrors of AD U&C.

Anyway, back to the DPM install…

Logged on with my new domain credentials I’m good to go!

This being an R2 server I already have PowerShell and Installer 4.5, so the SIS goes in.

DPM comes with its own copy of SQL 2008, unlike the rest of the System Center Suite… Quite why this is I have no idea, but if you wish you can let it do its own thing with SQL…

And we’re done.

I then pushed out an agent to a test SQL box from the Management node. On this server I’d created a dummy database with a single table. I added two dummy records to this table, then created a DPM Protection Group to protect this database.

One of the new features is illustrated above, I can now protect a SQL Instance (HYPERV-VMM above) the bonus being that whenever I add a new database it’s automatically protected.

I left this running for a while and now I can recover back to any point in time:

I delete some records from my demo database, pick a time from just before I did that and as if by magic, the data reappears…

With DPM I can elect to recover my data in a few different ways. One cool feature with SQL restore is I can take a SQL 2005 backup and recover to SQL 2008.

Having selected my recovery option I see a summary of the items to be recovered, then we’re done.

When this completes, the restore is complete. The DPM interface is very polished, I reckon it’s hard to get excited about backup, but there’s some really good stuff here and with the integration of online services (DPM to cloud backup) things get very interesting…