Hey All,

This is the second part of the 3-part sharepoint 2010 protection series

In the first part we looked at the things that were necessary as prerequiste to protect a sharepoint farm.  We also looked at some details about sharepoint protection.

Today, we gonna create a protection group for sharepoint.

Background information

This picture shows how DPM works for sharepoint protection.

So when we are protecting a sharepoint farm (as said in the previous post) with one click, then we are protecting all these items with their different writers.

Basically, when you want to protect a sharepoint farm, DPM 2010 will do everything for you in the back-end.  That’s easy :-)

Don’t forget, whenever you create a new content database, and the auto-protect option is enabled, then it will be automatically protected within 24 hours.

You will however get a warning alert in the Console that there is a new content database.

The same will happen when the Sharepoint Administrators delete a content database.  DPM 2010 will figure this out, give you a warning alert, and you just need to follow the information in that alert to reconfigure the protection group.

One other thing that can go wrong is that the Sharepoint administrators change the farm administrator password that you use to protect (see previous post).  At that moment, you will get a warning alert but DPM will continue to backup everything he knows.  However, he won’t be able to query the config database anymore, so he won’t know when there are (for example) new content databases.  So if you are having this issue, perform the commands again from my previous post with the new password (or even new user and passwords) and you’re back ok.

Create the protection group

Ok, so let’s create a protection group for sharepoint.

Choose Servers to continue

When I open my sharepoint server, I will see a possibility of choosing a sharepoint farm.  So I select it

Here I choose my short-term and long term protection.  No tape library in my environment here so…

Time to choose the settings for the short-term protection.  So here you can define how long you want to be able to recover and when he needs to take a full express backup.  Note that this is the only possibility for sharepoint farm protection.  Synchronizations are not possible.  If you wander how many disk space this is going to eat, then you need to calculate your chunk that you have each day.  But how do you calculate this chunk?  Well, with DPM you can find out, so my suggestion would be to use the tool a few days to see the changes, and use the excel sheets that can do an estimate based on your input.

DPM will calculate itself the diskspace, but since it doesn’t know how many data changes there are on average a day, it will remain an estimate.  You can however choose to let the auto-grow option on so that it will automatically grows the volume.  (DPM admins, don’t forget to review the great disk utilization reports weekly :-))

Note that the co-location option is not selectable.  This is because co-location is not supported for Sharepoint protection.

Choose when you want to create the initial replica.  This is preferred to do outside the working hours if you are having a large farm that is used intensively.

Here you have the option to do an automatic consistency check when the replica isn’t consistent anymore or to do it on a daily base on a fixed hour.  My advice, if possible, do it automatically whenever it is inconsistent but if the load is too heavy on your production sharepoint servers, then schedule it on a daily base after working hours or at the most convenient time.

Finally the summary

Ok.  In our next post, we will show you how you can do an item-level recovery.

Cheers,

Mike

Read the complete post at http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/03/12/sharepoint-2010-protection-in-dpm-2010-part-2.aspx