Data Protection Manager

System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager (DPM) is the System Center 2012 R2 product that allows you to perform backup and recovery tasks.You can use DPM to perform backup and recovery of multiple Hyper-V virtualization hosts as well as configure protection for applications and data hosted within VMs.DPM supports backup replication to a second DPM server.DPM uses disk to store protected short-term data.You can configure DPM to write protected data to tape for long-term protection.You can also configure DPM to replicate protected data to Windows Azure, where it can be stored for up to 120 days.

For example, to configure DPM to protect the VMs hosted on one or more Hyper-V virtualization hosts, you first deploy the DPM agent to each server running Hyper-V.You then create a DPM protection group, specify which VMs you want to back up, as shown in Figure 5o, and then configure protection settings (such as how long you want to store protected data, how frequently DPM performs synchronization and how often DPM performs consistency checks on protected data)

Once you’ve configured VMs on a Hyper-V host to be protected, you can also configure a script that runs as a scheduled task, which automatically adds any new VMs deployed to a protected Hyper-V server to a DPM Protection Group.

You can deploy DPM agents to individual VMs, allowing protection within the VM.For example, in heterogeneous environments where you might be using virtualization hosts running Hyper-V and a third-party solution, you may choose to back up Windows VMs running on the third-party virtualization hosts by deploying the agent to the VM.

To protect a VMM management server, you need to protect the VMM database as well as any library shares that the server hosts. Figure 5p shows the configuration of a DPM Protection Group for a VMM management server where the VMM database and the library share are configured for protection.

Figure 5p. Protect VMM database and library

Find Out More:

You can learn more about protecting VMM hosts with Data Protection Manager by consulting the following TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh771597.aspx

DPM supports the following VM recovery options as shown in Figure 5q:

Recovery of the VM to the original location.When you select this option, the original VM’s hard disk is deleted.DPM will recover both the virtual hard disks and VM configuration files to their original location.

Recovery of the VM to an alternate location.When you select this option, you can recover the VM to a different Hyper-V host that has the DPM agent installed.

Recovery to a network folder.When you choose this option, you can recover the VM files to a network folder.

Figure 5q. VM recovery location

DPM also supports item-level recovery.Item-level recovery allows you to recover specific files, folders, volumes and virtual hard disks from a protected VM to a network share or volume on a server that has the DPM agent installed.When you perform item-level recovery, you are only able to recover files, folders, volumes and virtual hard disks to a network location.

Find Out More:

You can learn more about recovering VMs with Data Protection Manager by consulting the following TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ library/hh757981.aspx