Modey

Agreed. I put the 2012 RC on to an old server the other day and took an instant dislike to the interface. I guess I would end up using it to use the new Hyper-V features and stick to using a remote Hyper-V console ...

It may be worth trying to upgrade to DPM2012 if you can't find a fix. It's available now and you can do an in-place upgrade from 10 to 12. Just bear in mind that it tends to mean an agent upgrade on all servers and a full consistency check on everything before you are back to normal.

Presumably some of the new servers are clustered? I tried backing up clustered servers some time ago with DPM and ran into problems very similar to this. Unless the SAN you are using supports a hardware VSS writer then you have to heavily modify the config of DPM using scripts. It looked like far more trouble than it was worth and I actually de-clustered the servers (it was more of an experiment clustering, not something that I actually needed).

Was a good course, glad I took part in it. Thanks Ken, Tony & Stan!

I think that's quite an open ended question as there are lots of different ways to achieve a degree through the OU. Your best bet would be to have a look on the OU site, particularly at the Computing courses. Here is a link to some general info about OU degrees though and what's required in order to pass one. BD - BA/BSc Open degree - Open University Qualification

Credits towards an OU degree in a nutshell. The second two modules of the course also happen to map directly to a couple of Server 2008 MSCTS's in terms of the training material. So in theory after doing the course you would be in a position to also sit the exams and gain the certs. That isn't really the point of the course though.

I take it you mean an appeal against the Pay & Benefits scheme?

As far as I am aware mate, it's delivered primarly via MS elearning materials. I'm still new to the OU as I was only appointed last week, so I'll know more about the course very soon.

Well depending on what is your nearest regional centre, then I may well be seeing you in early October as I'm going to be tutoring this course (for the East Midlands region). If there is a lot of demand for it nationwide then there may well be multiple tutors assigned to the course.

We are using a combination of Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010RC, Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Assist 5. All of the major backing up work is done by DPM and amounts to about 2TB per night. That backs up to disk (stored for 7 days) and is also backed up to tape every night. Friday tapes are rotated so that we can go back up to a month. Tapes are kept in a datasafe. We use a dedicated server with 11TB of disk storage for backing up, and the primary tape system is a Quantum Superloader 3 with an LTO4 drive in it. We also backup admin & financial data seperately to this to an LTO2 tape drive (using Backup Exec). As we need to keep these tapes much longer (7 years for the financial info) it's easier to keep it seperate from the main backup (and cheaper). The server was about 2 grands worth a while back and the tape libary was a recent purchase and was about £2500. DPM we aren't paying for yet as it's an RC, but when it goes RTM we'll buy it through the MS Schools agreement. I can't imagine it will cost too much, 100 quid maybe?

[whinge mode on] It's happened on quite a few threads I have looked at (and contributed to) recently. The OP asks a question, advice is forthcoming, but then no response from the OP. It's most perturbing! [whinge mode off] Maybe if I answer a post, it's the kiss of death.

Whenever we have the same error messages on our ISA server (TMG 2010 now) it's because the Internet is down (EMBC). We have never had that in relation to an error with our ISA server config or setup etc...

My DPM2010RC setup has a single group which backs up all of our physical & virtual servers bar 1 or 2. They have 7 days worth of short term disk protection, and are also backed up to tape every night. We then do a weekly backup to tape on every Friday so we have a months worth of protection. For SIMS and the DPM server itself, they are backed up to a different tape drive (similar rotation as above), but we take out a tape each month and will be keeping those up to 7 years in theory (although we don't have that many accumulated yet). There are some fairly stringent regulations in place (especially in regard to financial data). As for your proposed setup, you mention the sims drive, then another protection group for the sims Hyper-v. If you are using DPM2010RC then protecting the Hyper-V server will also protect all of the drives on that server. DPM works better with 2008 servers better than 2003 though (in terms of granularity) so if your SIMS is running on 2K3 then you may want to consider backing it up independantly of DPM (like I do). What would give you more control over exactly what is being backed up though would be to install a DPM agent directly onto the SIMS server rather than backing it up from the Hyper-v side of things. For us it's easier handling SIMS seperatly mainly from the tape point of view, and given than we need to keep a lot of them due to data archiving regulations. edit: oh yeah and as for short term disk protection, I'm not sure the 2 x 1.5TB drives you have will be enough. It eats disk space big time. Take the total amount of data you are backing up, then quadruple it. Shoud give you a rough idea of the space needed.

I'm not sure if it's the best way of doing it, but it would work as far as I can tell. DPM2010 allows you to replicate to another DPM server (tends to be called the DR - Disaster recovery server). This would syncronise with your primary DPM server in Site A to whatever schedule you specify. In the event that your primary DPM goes down, then the DR server can become the new primary server until such time as the primary is back up. Then providing you have enough capacity in the host server at site B, you could restore the VM and have it back up and running very quickly. In order not to suffer too much data loss, you would need a pretty frequent syncro between the DPM servers.

DPM 2010RC seems very good for backing up Hyper-V so far (it should be though, it was designed to do this). DPM is fussy about short term disk storage and how it's configured though. Ideally you would want it attached to a SAN or a large dedicated disk array on the server itself. I use the latter configuration plus a Quantum Superloader tape libary for long term storage.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the costings and the spec of the new server(s) also. Even 6k sounds a little steep to me for virtualizing 4 servers. That would depend on what they are proposing exactly though. We provided new hardware and virtualized servers for two primary schools (that we support, as well as our own school) last summer. We probably did it a bit on the cheap side for them, but if I recall we only charged about 500 + the cost of the hardware. edit: Come to think, if it did include a San and or costing for VMWare then it could get pricey very quickly. I was basing it on using Hyper-V and no san.

See post number #33

I'm going to try it for all pupils at my place now that I have seen this thread.

We do a backups to two different tape drives each night. One uses Backup Exec 12.5 and backs up 100GB to an Ultrium 2 drive (admin & financial data). That takes about 50mins. Our main backup for all of our servers is a touch over 2TB in total and takes about 10hrs. That's backed up using DPM2010RC to a Quantum Superloader 3 with a LTO4 drive. Both tape drives are external SCSI.

No they don't need the client firewall in order for the url filtering to work.

Debunking the Myth that the ISA Firewall Should Not be a Domain Member

I bought a kit recently from an estabilshed card audio shop who have an ebay shop. It would of course depend on if the head unit in your Toyota and if it will take the kind of connection I linked above. FM Transmitters are utterly cack though. If you want poor quality audio that needs re-tuning constantly, it's the way to go! Even hard wired fm modulators aren't that brilliant to be honest, but still much better than a transmitter (the modulator takes an input from your MP3 player etc.. and send the signal directly into the ariel, doesn't transmit it).

Yeah Backup Assist is a nice program. It uses NTBackup (when on Server 2003) to do it's backing up, but you get a much more advanced interface for dealing with and setting up your backups. It's got some extra features like Exchange and SQL support that work very well also. When we bought a few licences last summer it was about £59 per basic license (educational discount), then for specific add ons like SQL it's a bit extra. It might be worth a try to see if it gives your NTBackup the kick up the backside that it seems to need. They do a fully functional 30 day trial btw.

Just a heads up for anyone thinking of using MS DPM. You will need quite a bit of disk storage space in order to backup to disk, before archiving off to tape. The reason for this is that DPM allocates disk volumes (with space to grow) for each protection item (these can be server hard disk volumes, hyper-v stores etc...). I had setup a 6TB volume in Raid5 config yesterday (4 x 2TB disks), but that looked like it wasn't going to be enough, so I extended it even further. I like the program so far, but just be warned about disk space.

We still use tapes for the flexibility they offer and the low cost (per MB). DPM 2010 is now available as an RC and it's looking very good so far. I intend to use it to backup everything from now on. It was a little tricky getting it to work with our new Quantum Superloader 3 but that's sorted now. https://connect.microsoft.com/site840/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=26452