This post is written by Ilse Van Criekinge from Pro-Exchange.be

As covered in a previous post, I have updated my Microsoft Unified Communications demo environment to include DPM 2007 Sp1. Anxious to see how this new promised feature "Support for Exchange Server Standby Continuous Replication" would work, I sat down and configured SCR and DPM protection. Let's see...

Demo Setup
Two Exchange 2007 Sp1 RU4 servers, one enterprise edition, and one standard edition. Both with the mailbox server role, deployed in the same domain, and running the same os.

Enable SCR
I created a new storage group on my EX2007EE, called DPMSP1, and enabled SCR versus my target EX2007SE. 



Create some logs 


Check Prereqs for protection SCR Target
Microsoft published a nice "What's new in Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1", which includes the following lines on Support for Exchange Server Standby Continuous Replication:

• Disk-to-disk-to-tape protection.
  
  
• A copy backup on the SCR target. The copy backup will not truncate the log files on the SCR target.
  
  
• Stand-alone only and CCR clusters as the SCR source.
  
  

• Incremental backups for all data sources on the SCR target.
  
  
• Protecting data sources from SCR target and non-SCR computers in the same protection group.
  
  
• Recovering from backups where the SCR flag was either enabled or disabled, if the SCR flag is disabled during recovery time.
  

Time to create a new Protection Group
After reading the mentionned article, I decided to create a new protection group: 

 

 


It seems the SCR target is not listed as such, so I need to select the target by selecting the directory manually. 



And continue selecting the right options: 

 

 

 

 

 


After the protection group is created successfully I can see that the creation of the replica works fine: 

 


Creating a new recovery point, boils down to synching all changed files back to the DPM server (.edb and new log files).
As can be seen in the next print screens where you see the difference in file size between two recovery points: 

 

 


How about the event log?
When you take an Exchange-aware backup of a normal storage group (standalone or clustered), you will get a notificiation in your event log that there is a VSS backup is bein initiated:


You don't see any logging (by default) when a SCR target is backed up.

First impressions
It is absolutely possible to take a backup of a SCR target using DPM 2007 Sp1! However, to configure it, you don't really have such a nice wizard interface as you do when taking an Exchange aware backup of a normal storage group (stand-alone or clustered). But definitely, something that rocks :-)

- Ilse

ps as said in previous posts, we have been forced to disable the ability to post comments due to comment spammers, so if you have a comment/remark just let me know by mail @ ilse.vancriekinge[@]pro-exchange.be

Dragging and dropping some bigger files helped me get more than 50 log files, so I can relax since SCR seems to be working :-)

Read the complete post at http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2009/01/09/protecting-a-scr-target-using-dpm-2007-sp1.aspx