While I was away on vacation last week, Microsoft finally released the DPM 2007 Rollup packages to Microsoft Downloads. (I blame Jason Buffington; I'm sure he waited until I was out of office.) There are both x86 and x64 packages; both require you to download three separate files.
In addition to various bug fixes, this rollup (also known as a "feature pack") provides the following new functionality:
- Official support for protecting Windows Server 2008 servers (and supported applications, such as Exchange Server 2007, running on Windows 2008), including protecting the system state.
- You get support for backing up clustered Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 environments. Before, the cluster itself was not seen as a cluster by DPM, and depending on your configuration you may have needed to do some funky scripting.
- Better tape handling. You can now share tape libraries between multiple DPM servers, reducing the cost of long-term tape retention and allowing better utilization of high-end tape libraries. You can also put multiple protection groups on a single tape; DPM 2007 RTM would start a new tape as it began writing each protection group, even if the previous tape was not fully used. This could get expensive.
I haven't yet been able to confirm whether the cleaning tape bug Tim noted has been fixed in this update, but I suspect not.
Applying this update is a four-step process:
- Install the main DPM update (DataProtectionManager2007-KB949779.exe)on your DPM servers.
- Install the SQL Server update (SqlPrep-KB949779.msp) on the machine hosting the SQL Server database for DPM. In a default install, this is the same machine that is your DPM server.
- Update the agents on your protected servers to version 2.0.8107.0. You can push them out through the console or manually run the .msp update package on your protected machines (using any supported push mechanism). You will need to restart the protected machines for the new agent version to take effect.
- Update the DPM Management Shell update (DPMManagementShell2007-KB949779.msp) on all of your DPM management stations (including the DPM servers themselves).
Although the official instructions give the update steps in the previous order, I have run all three udpates on my lab DPM servers before updating the agents on my protected servers, and as long as Microsoft doesn't say that's not supported, that's the way I'd recommend doing it -- that way, all of your PowerShell tasks are using the updates even if you don't have all the protection agents pushed out yet.