Hey All,
Just been a week in vacation with the wife and kids and had a great time swimming, walking and playing in the playgrounds with the children. Now that the DPM V3 Public Beta is announced and there, I thought it was time again to look at the promised features for V3 and to check if the product is worth our attention. (Hey, a silent evening in a cottage, with the kids and wife sleeping, a good glass wine in my hand and some good music on… ;-))
So here’s what’s new, based on what was already in V2
For Exchange: Of course they will support E14 in addition to Ex2007 and Ex2003. There will also be improved Restore Granularity. What exactly is not known yet but the DPM team worked together with the Exchange team to see what is possible and supported.
For SQL: You will be able to protect an entire SQL instance, making that DPM will auto discover new DB’s within that instance. DPM v3 will also be able to protect 1000 DB’s per DPM server which is a huge improvement over the 300 DB’s that v2 could. There will also be Role-Based Access for a SQL admin to do his or hers work with the DPM console.
For Sharepoint: Support for Office 14, Sharepoint server 2007 and 2003. There will be no recovery farm requirement for Office 14 and auto-detection of new content databases within the farm.
For Hyper-V: Item-level restore from VHD backup, support for Hyper-V2 deployments using Live Migration (CSV) and Dynamic VM guest migration support (Meaning you should be able to restore to alternate Hyper-V hosts)
What’s completely new?
For AD: Active Directory will now appear as a data source and not be part anymore of the system state. This will allow IT administrators to centrally manage backups from DPM (although performed locally) and local admin restore from windows server backup. It will also allow to do a DPM restoration of a whole domain controller.
For Bare Metal Recovery: Windows Server 2003 will continue with SRT but windows server 2008 will use Windows Server Backup for image-based restore, again centrally managed from DPM but locally executed.
For New Datasources: Protection of windows guests on VMWare hosts will be supported and Microsoft Dynamics AX will be a new datasource. SAP running on SQL server will also be a new datasource
For Laptops: Backup over VPN will be possible where Windows seven is of course the new OS that will be included. Per DPM server you will be able to scale up to 1000 clients. Only Unique user data will be protected so that not the entire OS is repeatedly on your expensive storage ;-). DPM will also integrate with local shadow copies for Vista and Windows 7 which will be centrally configured from the DPM Admin User Interface BUT the end user will be able to restore from local copies offline and online as well as from DPM copies online.
Server Side:
DPM V3 promises to be Enterprise Ready where the scalability is increased and each DPM server will now have the possibility of having 80 TB of storage.
New Management Pack updates will be ready for SCOM and SQL admins will have Role-based management at their hands.
The one thing I am really looking forward to is the fact that MS promises to give us automatic rerunning of jobs and improved self-healing. Also the automatic protection of new SQL databases or MOSS content databases seems very promising. They also promised less “Inconsistent Replicas” errors and they will reduce the Alert Volume.
The DPM to DPM replication will also be improved and (more important I think) there will be a One-click DPM DP failover and failback scenario available. Also improved scheduling will be there.
For the SAN restore, there will be continued support using scripts and whitepapers that are delivered through the vendors but there’s no change with the previous version.
And last but not least, the DPM server should be 64-bit and W2k08 or better.
Conclusion: This seems like a lot of improvements and definitely worth to check it out
Next post: Installation of DPM v3 Beta
Cheers,
Mike
