Data Protection Manager 2010 advice sought

[Bruce123]

We have planning to implement Data Protection Manager 2010 over the Summer.

 

We have a dedicated server (Dell R200) and 4 Qnap NAS boxes (iSCSI). We are looking at backuping up around 28 servers (some/majority of these are virtual)

 

My question is, what are the advantages/disadantages with installing the agent onto the Hyper-V host, over installing the agent onto all of the VMs and treating them as seperate machines? I don't want to do both as it's a waste of backup storage.

 

Also, for long term stroage I am undecided between a Quantum 8 LTO5 auto tape changer connected with a 6Gbit SAS cable, or use Firestreamer to backup to locally attached USB HDDs.

 

I really don't like tape as there are so many disadvantages, on the other hand I have concerns about using Firestreamer. The company seems to depend on this as their main product and the main use of this product seems to be for DPM2010. So there seems to be significant risk that the company could go under, leaving customers in the lurch, particularily in relation to archived backups and needing to restore data from them.

 

All it would take is for MS to add backup to USB into their next version and Cristalink may go under.

 

Am am particularily intestested to hear from anyone with any experience of implementing DPM 2010.

 

Or did anyone get consultants into implement it (e.g. due to tight timescales/lack of expertise), or who have worked with them to implement it?

 

For info: All the servers will be 2003/2008 and 2008 R2. We also have Exchange/ISA 2006 and several instances of SQL Server dating back to 2005 version, we no longer have Sharepoint to backup. Not that relevant but we have 4 sites connected at 100Mbit.

 

Regards,

 

Bruce.

 

Leeds, UK.

[strawberry]

The difference will be either having a vhd and config file or being able to restore at a file level.

 

One of the wonderful things with DPM is having secondary servers, you can configure a second server to backup a primary server

[Bruce123]

With DPM2010, can you not restore at the file level when backing up the Hyper-V host (and the VHDs)?

[Simcfc73]

With DPM2010, can you not restore at the file level when backing up the Hyper-V host (and the VHDs)?

 

Yes you can recover file level through the console if you are backing up the VHD.... one thing not to do is to convert to dynamic disks on the client (I think this is right)..it stops it working at file level and the client has to paused to do the backup...still auto but not as slick.

[steve]

We are just in the process of setting up something very similar - HP G7 + qnaps (iscsi)

 

Are you using Hyper-V with cluster shared volumes? If so you'll need VSS + snapshots on you're hyper-v SAN to get good speed backups and no performance hit. info

 

We've started with manually making disaster recovery copies of VMs, then using DPM to backup contents that can be restored into the VMs.

 

Going to look at some method of backing up the VMs automatically - either DPM or hyperoo. VEEAM are set to release a hyper-v version in the near future too.