Data Protection

DPM 2007 Rollup packages now available

Devin L. Ganger — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:34:31 GMT

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.

masteringdpm.com back online

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:26:49 GMT

Things got hairy enough last week that I forgot to post, but my hosting provider got the problem sorted out and the website is back online.

masteringdpm.com temporarily down

Devin L. Ganger — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:43:45 GMT

If you've tried to get to masteringdpm.com in the past couple of days, you may have gotten a cryptic error message instead of a site with DPM goodness. I'm working with my hosting provider to get it put back up ASAP and will post again once it's back up.

Tech-Talk: Making Backups Cool with DPM

Devin L. Ganger — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:55:50 GMT

While I was at the Tech-Ed NA IT Pro conference last week, Jason Buffington and I took the chance to invade the Tech-Ed Online fishbowl studio and record a quick Tech-Talk on using DPM. You can now view it online on the Tech-Ed IT Pro page and the Library page, or stream it directly. Now that Tech-Ed's over, maybe we'll both find the time to be on Xbox Live at the same time so we can continue our discussion in Call of Duty 4...

Revised guidance on protecting Exchange with DPM 2007

Devin L. Ganger — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:36:11 GMT

Just a quick note to let you all know that the Protecting Exchange Server with DPM 2007 white paper is available for download from Microsoft. This is the same white paper I worked on for them last year, but freshly revised to include more guidance around mailbox-level recovery.

I'll be giving a talk around this topic next week at Tech-Ed (IT Pro) in Orlando, session number MGT369. Hope to see you there! (Yes, this is the same talk I did at Exchange Connections in Orlando and in MMS in Vegas a month ago; it seems to be a popular session!)

Post-Conference report

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:16:15 GMT

As I typically do, I'm posting links to my slide decks for the presentations I just finished giving. I apologize to the Connections folks; I was supposed to get this done Monday afternoon or Tuesday and got ambushed by a travel-induced migraine.

Orlando was nice this time of year; not too hot, so the humidity slipped under the radar. It was nice to see a bunch of familiar faces and meet some new ones, and I was very pleased with the attendance at all of my sessions. Doing all three sessions back-to-back is definitely a drain, but the conference organizers helped out a lot by keeping me in the same room for all of them, and had I stayed for a couple of days I'd definitely have had the . And I have apparently finally beaten my notorious string of demo failures; my demo DPM environment (provided by Jason Buffington of Microsoft, thank you Jason) worked quite nicely.

For the MMS folks, I can't put my deck up directly; you'll need to get it from the MMS CommNet or wait for your attendee DVD to show up. Las Vegas is still completely over the top; the Venetian was opulent and provided a nice venue. For some reason, the casino didn't seem nearly as intrusive as it could have been (and is in other venues). I am, however, glad I had new shoes -- my feet didn't hurt from all the walking. For the flight home, I picked up 21: Bringing Down the House - Movie Tie-In: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions at the airport and read it cover-to-cover; a great story told well.

A DPM roundup

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:06:22 GMT

This was a big travel week for me; I got the privilege of speaking about protecting Exchange with DPM 2007 at both Exchange Connections (in Orlando) and Microsoft Management Summit (in Las Vegas). The session had a good response at both shows, and there's clearly a lot of buzz going around about DPM. I've gotten some good questions which I'll list here and update as I get answers.

Q: Does DPM protect message tracking logs on an Exchange mailbox server?
A: Very good question. My gut instinct is "No" but I need to confirm that. I'll post the confirmation in a separate blog article when I get an answer back.
Q: Is there any good guidance on sizing a DPM installation?
A: Yes. First see the Data Protection Manager 2007 Storage Calculator (currently only supports the Exchange workload), then see this third-party deconstruction. Note that the second post was written against an earlier release of the calculator, so is in need of some updating, but it's still a good read.
Q: What kind of overhead does DPM incur?
A: I have to admit that I don't remember the specifics of this question (this is why I strongly encourage folks to email their questions to me, as is the case with the following question -- thanks!); all I have is a cryptic note "CPU overhead" on my notepad. So, I'm going to assume that we're talking about the overhead of the protection agent on a protected server. And my answer to that is: Very good question; I need to get some specifics.
Q: From e-mail: "Yesterday during MMS at the Advanced Exchange protection session you mentioned that you had created a white paper on getting DPM working with IBM’s TSM product. If you have a link to this I would be very grateful as I have not been able to find it currently and I am wanting to ensure that they way I have it set up and kind of working is the same way that someone else has been able to get it working."
A: Unfortunately, I must have been unclear, for which I apologize. 3Sharp did work with Microsoft during the DPM 2006 timeframe to create several white papers on how to integrate DPM with several backup products: Commvault QiNetix, Symantec Backup Exec, Yosemite Backup, and Windows Backup. Unfortunately, Tivoli wasn't one of them, and I'm not aware of any current guidance that gives a complete end-to-end picture of integrating TSM with DPM 2007. However, the Backup of DPM Servers section in the DPM Operations Guide should be a good starting place.
Q: Why can't I use DPM 2007 to recover to the Recovery Storage Group on Exchange 2003 servers, only on Exchange 2007 servers?
A: Another great question, which I'm querying to find the answer to.
Q: If I can use DPM 2007 to do document-level recovery in SharePoint, why can't I recover mailboxes or even messages in Exchange without having to use the RSG (for Exchange 2007)or ExMerge (for Exchange 2003)?
A: There are two parts of this answer, but they both are based on the same premise: DPM does not use "privileged" information on the internals of other Microsoft applications it protects. When recovering documents from a SharePoint replica, DPM doesn't directly reach into the replica database and extract the information. Instead, it recovers the relevant databases to a temporary recovery SharePoint installation (which can be a single server SPS 3.0 install on a virtual machine, even if you're recovering data from MOSS 2007) and then finds the relevant documents using SharePoint's HTTP interfaces. With Exchange, the principle is the same; we recover the mailbox database to a parallel location (the RSG in Exchange 2007; a network folder in Exchange 2003) and then use the Exchange native tools to extract and import the relevant information. Trying to do direct restores of mailboxes or messages into a production database would involve going beyond the existing Exchange APIs. Personally, as an Exchange MVP I hope that Microsoft works on expanding those interfaces to make this sort of thing easier for all third-party vendors, but until they do, DPM plays by Exchange's rules.
Q: You mentioned coming updates to DPM. Where can I find more info on that?
A: Jason Buffington of Microsoft has you covered with this webcast.

That's a good start for now; catch you all later!

Greetings from Orlando!

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:53:24 GMT

I'm posting from a break between sessions at Exchange Connections in Orlando, FL. I just had a good session on protecting Exchange with DPM -- thanks to everyone who attended and gave lots of good feedback.

Next up -- a session on DCAR with Exchange, and then Exchange 2007 update best practices.

The weather is actually the best I've ever seen here -- not too hot, with a nice breeze, so the humidity isn't overwhelming. However, the A/C is up full in the room I'm presenting, so I'm glad the speaker shirts are long-sleeved.

More later!

DPM book hot off the presses

Devin L. Ganger — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Early this week, Ryan and I received our authors' copies of Mastering System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, the book we co-wrote about, well, mastering DPM 2007. Amazon says it's in stock, so if the topic is at all of interest to you, please consider buying a copy or ten and making our publisher happy!

Two more interesting tidbits around the book:

I'l be giving a session on Exchange and DPM for the Spring 2008 Exchange Connections conference in Orlando; I'm hoping to be able to make other arrangements as well.
The book will have its own website, http://www.masteringdpm.com/ (it's not live yet!), in just another couple of days, by the weekend at the latest; the DNS zone is already registered, I just need to get the website software up and running.

Exchange and DPM data protection myths

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 03:25:00 GMT

[Edited 12/12/2007 to correct KB/MB error in the log file sizes; thanks to Chris Scharff for catching it.]

Recently, I've seen a couple of pieces of misinformation about Exchange 2007 and DPM floating around in the ether. Rather than let them go uncontested, I figured I'd mention them here and give them the good puncturing they deserve:

Exchange 2007's continuous replication features rely on backup and restores. Um, wow. This is so wrong I can't even begin to figure out what mistake in understanding brought this one about. The continuous replication options (LCR, CCR, and SCR) rely on log shipping -- the process of taking the transaction logs from one copy of the protected mailbox database and sending them to another copy. Here's the key thing: this process is not backup and restore. True, copying outstanding transaction logs is a necessary part of an Exchange backup strategy, but an Exchange backup is also taking copies of the mailbox database files directly. Remember how Exchange uses transaction logs:
1. A write operation is generated by Exchange, such as when a new message is placed in a mailbox or a client makes an update to a message property.
2. The operation is written sequentially to the next open transaction log file (these files are always 5MB in size in Exchange 2000/2003, 1MB in size in Exchange 2007). Note that this sequential write is performed to increase disk performance.
3. The write operation is marked as complete and Exchange moves on to the next operation. It has not, however, yet been written to the database!
4. At some later time, Exchange takes the queued-up write operations and applies them, in order, to the actual mailbox database. This is a random write operation, which in turn requires more seek operations (and is slower), so Exchange tries to make this happen when there's less I/O on the database.
Continuous replication options don't protect against database corruption. Again, no. If you take a look at the process I just talked about for the previous point, you should see why this second myth is also false. Each I/O operation is written to the transaction log first, then applied to the database at a later point in time. If you ship the transaction log files to a second replica, that replica is recreating its own copy of the database. It's not a bit-for-bit copy of the source Exchange database; it's an independent re-creation. The particular hardware and load conditions that contribute to any given database corruption on the source database don't exist on the target database.
DPM doesn't do block-level copies; it's just copying Exchange data as a file copy. Well, this is true if you're using DPM 2006; it doesn't have native support for Exchange, so you first have to use something like NTBackup to dump the database to a file on disk, which DPM 2006 can then protect.

In DPM 2007, however, this all changes -- you now have native Exchange support. Not only will DPM 2007 do direct copies of your Exchange databases at the disk block level, ensuring that only the blocks that have changed are synchronized, but it also watches the transaction logs and copies them to. DPM essentially keeps another replica of your protected databases in its storage pool, which means you have a restore granularity unmatched by conventional backup programs.

Now that Exchange 2007 SP1 is here, more and more people will be deploying Exchange 2007. That means more opportunities for vendors, consultants, and competitors to attempt to spread FUD and sell you on their product. Don't fall for these myths and be fooled into paying for something you already get with Exchange and DPM.

What myths have you heard? I'd love to hear them and address them in later posts!