System Center Data protection manager 2010

Now this series of posts has really gotten me charged up. This month as a whole has had me charged up for reasons obvious to the people who were privy to the happenings. I'm moving into a new role, more Technology Centric I may add with a lot more products to consult on apart from just AD and Messaging.

Microsoft recently announced the latest build of System Center Data protection manager 2010. Some may say that yeah, DPM's been there for quite a while, whats so new now? A LOT in fact.

For those who attended my sessions at the Tech.Ed India 2009, you'll remember that we worked on DPM 2007. DPM 2010 has got a whole lot of exciting feature sets, features and more incorporated. Here's a peek into what's going to be rolled into the RTM of System Center Data protection manager 2010.

Virtualization

This has been one of the biggest investments that were made in DPM 2010, and I absolutely love the features.  First and foremost, DPM 2010 Beta protects highly available virtual machines (VM) deployed on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) clusters -- in addition to standalone Hyper-V servers and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. For all above mentioned server configurations, DPM 2010 Beta supports:

Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (For Windows Server 2008 R2): DPM 2010 is LiveMigration aware and seamlessly protects a VM after it migrates to another node of the Hyper-V R2 cluster to another without manual intervention.
Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.
Original Location Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports online recovery of the protected VM to the original location.
Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.

Laptop Protection

Though client protection in DPM 2007 SP1 was enabled, it was designed for desktops and not optimized for mobile/often-disconnected users. DPM 2010's laptop feature is completely built from scratch and offers an optimized experience for the discerning DPM Admin as well as the laptop user.

• Seamless backups for roaming users (Backup over VPN, Backup when connected, Alert for SLA’s not met)

• Rich support for folder inclusion/exclusion and file types exclusion
• Integration with local Shadow Copies for Vista & W7
• Scales up to 1000 clients per DPM server
• Support for XP, Vista, and Win7

This reminds me of a feature called as DLO (Desktop, laptop, Office) in a widely used backup Software that is really shoddy and offers no real backup and storage protection. It's all in the name, no technical benefit per se and I can vouch for a fact since I've tried to use this option and spent several agonizing hours to try and make it work properly.

Reliability and Manageability 

In addition to features, this is an area where some really significant investments in DPM 2010 were made, with special recognition of the feedback from Enterprise customers who are deploying DPM across the large Windows farms within their heterogeneous environments.

• A new “Auto-Grow” feature that will extend the replica volume as the production data grows. 

• You will see far fewer “Replica Inconsistent” errors and many of them will automatically get fixed by Auto-Rerun, Auto-CC (Consistency Check).

• DPM 2010 has been made very flexible and robust to adapt for environment/configuration changes.

• There is a new Backup SLA report that you can configure for your needs and get it emailed every day.  You can even view it in the Protection View of the DPM UI, so no more custom scripts to determine if you have met your backup requirements.

Other Good Stuff

In addition to the above, a few of the other areas of enhancement include:

• Exchange - DPM 2010 extends robust Exchange protection to Exchange 2010 DAG clusters. Ooh ye, ooh ye.....
  

• SharePoint - For SharePoint 2010, there is no recovery farm required for item level recoveries and backups are optimized for large scale deployments.

• SQL Server – DPM 2010 now includes Instance-Level Protection and with Datasource Collocation, you can backup SQL servers with ~700-800 DBs.  DPM 2007 provided optimized SQL backups and with SQL End User Recovery in DPM 2010, you should be able to give the control back to SQL Admin while retaining the storage benefits of DPM SQL backups.

• Disaster Recovery replication (“DPM2DPM4DR”) - cyclic protection has been enabled (DPM A <==> DPM B) as well as chained (DPM A --> DPM B --> DPM C) protection for versatility in long-distance protection.

Stay tuned for more info on the other System Center line of products.

Exchange Server 2010 hit’s RTM Milestone!!!!!

For those who didn’t know this yet (apologies for the late post, had pressing work hence couldn’t update earlier), Exchange Server 2010 code is finally complete.

 

What this means is that Exchange Server 2010 has been released to the early adopters under the TAP program for a final look before Exchange Server 2010 is put up for General Availability. All this and more has happened on the 8th of October :) *heh*

 

For more details, dead on over to the Exchange Team Blog to read the full post!

Exchange 2010 update for Windows Mobile 6.1 devices

I’ve noticed recently that a lot of folks are having a hard time finding the update to Outlook Mobile that supports some new features of Exchange 2010, so I thought I’d post it.  The update is included in Windows Mobile 6.5 (which I hope to have soon now that a bunch of new devices are out – most likely the HTC Pure, aka Touch Diamond2) but is also available on Windows Mobile 6.1 via download.  Here is the link:  https://update.outlook.com/cabs/OutlookLiveSetup.cab.

For an overview of the new features check out the videos here.  The most noticeable differences are the new view (which includes a conversation view, if you’re into that), and integrated UM playback.  The UM playback is great – no more downloading attachments and playing them in Windows Media anymore.  Everything is integrated right into the message.

Cheers and Enjoy!

I'm BACK with a Bang !!!!!

I'm back in action with a bang and how!!!!! :)

For all those who were wondering what the heck happened to me, no new posts, no messages, no funny mails and neither some funnier tweets and Facebook updates, here's an update.

The last 1 month has been a very tumultuous one to say the least for me, both on the professional and personal front. A lot of events occurred in such rapid succession that I was actually unable to comprehend the speed and eloquence with which they unfolded, leaving me spellbound, shell shocked and wide mouthed at it's minimum & jumping around like crazy when things reached a defeaning crescendo!

This was one of the few occasions when I was not at home for either my birthday, or for the festival of diwali. But! This was one of the best diwali's ever for me yet, and even my folks are happy, so guess that's a good sign eh!? ;)

A loooong held wish came true and that too without much warning, and I'm hoping it opens new avenues and opportunities for me, as well as a sincere wish (again) that this one will last for a long time and develops into a more fruitful venture. As a geek, I was thrilled, overjoyed and humbled when it happened, plus made a lot of new friends and professional contacts in the process, and saw a completely different aspect of and towards life.

More on this will follow in the next post.

For those who were privy to all the happenings and who had a wishlist, all I'll say is Yeah yeah, hold on just a wee bit more. I got all the stuff you wanted.

For the uninitiated who had / still have no idea of what happened, wait for a week or so more. My second post will have all the gory ;) details of what happened in all it's splendor and gory glory! :)

A Lap Around Virtualization - Part 3

Platform Virtualization:

Platform virtualization allows arbitrary operating systems and resulting application environments to run on a given system. There are two basic models for this system virtualization: full virtualization, or a complete simulation of underlying hardware, and para-virtualization, which offers a “mostly similar” model of the underlying hardware.

These are implemented as Type 1 hypervisors, which run directly on hardware, and Type 2 hypervisors, which run on top of a traditional operating system.

Each of the top virtualization vendors offers variations of both models. It’s important to realize that there are design and performance trade-offs for any model of system virtualization.

Generally, the more abstract the OS is made from the underlying hardware, the less hardware-specific features can be accessed. Increased OS abstraction can also increase the potential for performance reduction and limitations.


Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by host software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment, a virtual machine, for its guest software. The guest software is not limited to user applications; many hosts allow the execution of complete operating systems.

The guest software executes as if it were running directly on the physical hardware, with several notable caveats. Access to physical system resources (such as the network access, display, keyboard, and disk storage) is generally managed at a more restrictive level than the processor and system-memory.

Guests are often restricted from accessing specific peripheral devices, or may be limited to a subset of the device's native capabilities, depending on the hardware access policy implemented by the virtualization host.