The recipe will cover an introduction to what DPM 2012 R2 is and explain the product.

For many years, the focus for protecting a data center has always been backup. There are many vendors and third-party solutions still claiming in the market that they are the best and most suitable backup solutions for your data center. If your purpose in performing the backup operation is being able to perform a restore, then the majority of the third-party software and vendors out in the market will not be able to help you. The most challenging part of providing a restore plan or a restore scenario for a service is that the third-party software and vendors are focusing on providing you just a backup, not the ability to restore. This is where DPM 2012 R2 comes in. It all started with the release of the Windows Server 2003, and with that release came the possibility of providing online snapshots using a new feature called Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). The APIs for the solutions were quickly adopted by third-party software and vendors but no one could, in the beginning, get it up and running in a fully optimal way. The idea regarding the VSS architecture was a great one and a big step forward regarding how to manage snapshots of different workloads like file, SQL, or Exchange in order to provide a consistent data snapshot.

Microsoft understood that if this architecture was to blossom in the way that they wanted it to, they needed to create backup and restore software themselves. In 2006, the first version of DPM was released with the focus only on protecting the file workload. A lot of companies tried it but few were adopting the new software since they still hosted and ran their data center with the traditional IT mindset.

During the past years Microsoft did not invest heavily in DPM, but under the new team that is driving the DPM solution from India, there have been a lot of investments, making DPM the primary choice for private cloud protection. Microsoft has invested in both developers and experts, pushing the product forward and making it a natural choice of the modern data center.

You may ask what is the thing that differentiates DPM from other backup software on the market. The answer is quite simple; restore based on supported and optimal scenarios with the power of easy integration building the BaaS, RaaS, and DRaaS for a modern data center. DPM knows the Microsoft stack architecture the best as it was written by Microsoft for the Microsoft technologies present in the data center. Combining DPM with the majority of the System Center family members and Azure technologies, you are able to provide an extremely high-end solution for your data center; it is all about design.

DPM only adapts to the current technology and solutions that Microsoft has developed for their workloads. DPM will never, for example, make any decisions on its own regarding SQL restore. The SQL team has clearly defined how a supported and optimal restore should occur and this is what DPM understands and adapts to; the same goes for all the Microsoft-branded workloads.

DPM always focuses on the restore scenario, since providing supported and optimal backup scenarios is not a challenge.

DPM 2012 R2 has the capability to back up production data sources to disk, tape, and Azure. For more detailed information regarding the DPM disk pool please read the Planning the DPM disk pool recipe. For more information regarding how DPM uses tapes, tape management, and Azure integration, please read Chapter 11, Azure Integration.

With DPM you are able to back up the most common workloads in a modern data center. The workloads that DPM will natively back up using the underlying VSS are:

The following figure shows the DPM back up process:

The primary DPM server is the first line of protection that you deploy for your production workloads. For systems that use transactional log systems (Exchange and SQL), you are able to replicate the production data from the protected data source to the primary DPM server every 15 minutes. This is also applicable to the file workloads.

Regarding the DPM disk pool, DPM has only one demand: the disk that should be used for the DPM disk pool must be presented in the operating system that has the DPM software installed as a local disk. DPM is able to operate with pass-through disks, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), or Storage Area Network (SAN) storage. It is also possible to communicate directly with a storage using the iSCSI initiator within the operating system of the DPM server. Please note that this is not a good, optimal, or in any way decent approach to a DPM disk pool; never use iSCSI.

When DPM 2012 R2 starts protecting a workload, it creates an initial copy of the production data source that it has to protect. This is stored in the DPM disk pool in a dedicated volume that uses the same GUID ID as the protected data source. This volume is called the replica volume. The replica volume will hold the only full back up that the DPM ever will do of the protected data source. All changes in data, also known as data churn, that occur after the replica has been created, will be synchronized to DPM disk pool. When creating a recovery point, the data is stored in the recovery point volume that also uses the GUID ID of the protected data source for identification.

The most important component of the DPM server architecture is the DPM database also known as the DPMDB. The DPMDB holds all the configurations made on the DPM server, protection groups, agents, backup schedules, and so on. It is of great importance that the DPMDB is protected via a secondary DPM server when you build the DPM-DPM-DR scenario, copied to file, or archived to tape.

DPM depends on its DPM agents that will perform a VSS request for the protected data sources and have that data replicated from the production environment to the DPM server.

For further information regarding DPM, there are numerous places you can visit online. There are both Microsoft websites and MVP blogs that provide you with good content and decent information: