Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

Microsoft’s SCDPM 2007 is the latest offering by Microsoft in the realm of data protection. It allows D-D-T protection for Exchange, SQL Server, and Sharepoint, along with standard file protection. We’ve installed it in our datacenter as a replacement to our current solution. Installation is pretty strait forward, and the wizards to setup your protection scheme is easy to navigate. Our server we are using is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with 10 Gb memory, dual 2 GHz Xeons, (2) 160 GB mirrored drives for os/dpm server files, and (6) 1TB drives RAID5 for the Storage Pool. The OS we are using is 2008 Server 64 bit.

Installation

OS Install

OS updates

Domain Server

Install powershell (servermanagercmd –i powershell)

Run ocsetup SIS-Limited /noreboot

Download Microsoft VSS Update for 2003 Server (WindowsServer2003-KB940349-v3-x86-ENU.exe) – used for servers in you protection groups

Download System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Feature Pack (32 or 64 bit, depending)

Launch DPM setup.

Prerequisites Check (next)

Product Reg (next)

Installation Settings – Select where SQL DB will reside, default is locally (next)

Security Settings – password for SQL (next)

Microsoft Update Opt-In – Use Microsoft Update? (next)

Customer Experience Improvement Program (next)

Summary of settings – Install

· On my test environment after install I had an issue with IIS/DPM Reports and Security. Select Reports Virtual Dir, Features View, Handler Mapping, Edit, Feature Perm’s, Select Script. This fixed the issue. Didn’t have it in my production roll out.

You than need to add your disk(s)s to the storage pool. Than you can update the server with the feature pack, install VSS update on 03 servers to be protected (requires reboot) and roll out the Protection agents (version 2.0.8107.0 at time of install)

Creating the Protection Groups

Under Protection, select Create protection group and the wizard pops up. Here is where you can add the data you want to protect, your short and long term goals for protection, and schedule. This is where you define your protection strategy and this (for us) took a long time to hash out. You can create multiple Groups, but cant have multiple groups using a single file or store.

AV

We use ESet for our AV solution, but regardless, make sure you exclude the Dpmra.exe and %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Bin