NOTE: I created this manual also in PDF, which you can download – PDF download – DPM 2010 Step by step installation by V-irtualization.com 

Probably a lot of you are already aware of Microsoft Data Protection Manager. It is Microsoft’s enterprise backup product for backing up the following:

  It is really a product that can backup mentioned products in best way there is, because Data Protection Manager product group at Microsoft works closely with other product groups to get the needed knowledge for recommended backup procedures. Anyway, the point of this blog post is not to describe benefits of DPM 2010, but rather to describe installation in easiest possible way. Because, if you are reading this blog post i suppose you are already somehow familiar with capabilities that DPM has.

  In this blog post you can find easy step by step procedures with pictures on installing DPM 2010. I did all procedures below on one notebook on which Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role is installed. On that notebook I created one Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine on which DPM 2010 is installed. So if you’d like to try to install DPM at least you should have:

· 1 machine for DPM 2010 (It can be virtual or physical machine),

· 1 disk for DPM installation and 1 disk for DPM storage pool (Storage Pool is place where DPM stores backup data. It must be clean partition, and no it can’t be any USB disk. If you are using virtual machine you can add VHD as you will see later. ),

· Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1

· On machine where you are installing DPM following operating systems are supported:

     – Windows Server 2008 64 bit

     – Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit

· DPM installation which you can download on MSDN,

· Domain (DPM will not install if machine where you are installing it is not joined to domain. If you are using computer with Hyper-V you can configure domain on physical host, or in another virtual machine).

If you covered all above you can start installing. In DPM 2010 installation procedure is pretty straightforward and all prerequisites will be installed using DPM setup. In previous versions you needed to install IIS role, and Single Instance Storage by yourself. Now in DPM 2010 IIS role is not needed anymore and Single Instance Storage is installed as part of your DPM setup.

1. First step is of course Welcome part. Click Next.

2. Now there’s prerequisites check. First it will check for basic components, required hardware and then System Attributes (e.g. Single Instance Storage etc…). As you can see on following picure Single Instance Storage is not installed on my computer so I clicked Next , for this to be installed as part of the Setup. If you were wondering, DPM is using Single Instance Storage (SIS) for optimizing storage space.

3. After Setup installs Single Instance Storage, you should restart your computer.

4. Manually start installer again and you should see that now everything is ok with prerequisites. Click Next.

5. Enter your Name and Company. Click Next.

6. Now you can chose whether to install SQL 2008 as part of Setup, or use your existing instance of SQL Server. If installing SQL 2008 as part of DPM 2010 Setup, everything will be installed automatically.

7. Enter Password for local user accounts that DPM creates automatically.

8. Choose if you’d like to use Microsoft Updates or not. Click Next.

9. Choose if you’d like to participate in Customer Experience Improvement Program. Click Next.

10. Review settings. If everything is ok then click Install.

11. Setup will first install SQL. It will last for about 20 minutes

12. After SQL is finished installing, DPM setup will proceed into installing Data Protection Manager 2010. It will last for approximately 10 minutes or less.

13. If everything is fine, you will see 3 green check marks. Click Close.

14. On desktop you will see two icons; one for DPM administrators console and other for DPM Management Shell. Double click on DPM administrators console shortcut and DPM will open as shown on following picture.

15. Now first thing you should do is to add disk to DPM storage pool. You can do that in management tab of DPM console.

But before that let’s see how to add disk to OS if you are using DPM in Hyper-V virtual machine.

16. Click on Settings for DPM virtual machine. Following window will open. Click on SCSI controller and then click Add to add Hard Drive.

17. Now click on that hard drive as shown in following picture. Create new virtual hard disk (.vhd) file by clicking New button. After clicking New, choose type of disk. In my case I have chosen fixed.

18. Window opens as shown here. Enter a name for new vhd and choose location where you’d like it to be stored. Click Next.

19. Choose a size of a new blank virtual hard disk. Click Next.

20. Click Finish. Considering that this is Fixed disk, you will have to wait couple of minutes while disk is being created. Of course duration can depend on size of your newly created virtual hard disk.

21. Click Ok to close Settings for DPM virtual machine.

22. Now click on Windows Start > Right Click on Computer > Choose Manage. The following window will open where you can navigate to Storage>Disk Management. You will see your newly created disk in black color. Right Click where is says „ Disk 1, Unknown, 10 GB, Offline“ and choose Online.

23. Navigate back to DPM console, onto Management tab and onto Disk sub-tab. On right side of console click Rescan. After that also on right side of console click Add. Window as shown below will open. Select the disk and click Add. Click OK.

24. Disk is now shown as in following picture.

25. That’s it, if you followed all steps, you should have DPM 2010 successfully installed and configured with one disk as Storage Pool. Of course before you can start backing you should install management agents on desired computers.

  Described procedure for Installing DPM and configuring Storage Pool can be very useful for demo scenarios. For production environments you should carefully choose DPM computer configuration and plan disk storage pool.

Yeah I know. You are probably wondering what does DPM or Exchange have to do with virtualization. Well it doesn’t, except that with DPM you can backup Virtual Server or Hyper-V virtual images, and Exchange is officially supported in virtual environment. Be that as it may, this post has really nothing to do with virtualization. Anyway, my latest project includes working with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager and Exchange 2007 CCR.  So I would like to share some known problems, and errors that may happen when you try to recover Exchange Storage group, or Mailbox Database to Original Exchange location. So after recovery process completes successfully, you are not completely done, because DPM replica becomes inconsistent. So why is that? Well, because DPM automatically recovers to Active node of Exchange CCR,  few steps must be done on Passive Node after recovery. Steps are:

Suspend replication for the storage group by running the following command:

Suspend-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server\StorageGroupName>

Reeseed the copy of database  using following command:

Update-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server\StorageGroupName>

Resume replication :

Resume-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server>\<StorageGroupName>

After all that, go back to DPM and do a Consistency Check  on your DPM replica and you will see nice green status color.