DPM 2012: The preview by Mike Resseler

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As MMS 2011 is going to the end, today was the most wanted session of the entire summit Winking smile

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The session started with the overview of how DPM has changed over the years, starting with V1, V2 and so on… Now, with DPM 2010 (which is V3) gaining more momentum, the team released what the new stuff will be in V4, or DPM 2012

The nice thing is that they listened to all of us out there, and implemented the most requested features

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So what can we expect for the next release:

Centralized Management

  • Centralized Monitoring
  • Remote administration
  • Remote recovery
  • Role Based management
  • Remote corrective actions
  • Scoped Troubleshooting
  • Push to Resume Backups
  • SLA based Alerting : Alert only when SLA violated
  • Consolidated Alerts ensure one ticket per root cause issue
  • Alert categorization (Ex: infra alerts versus backup failure alerts)
  • Allow admins to automate/extend the base functionality using PowerShell

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I can’t show you screenshots of how it looks, because they did a live demo but I can guarantee you that the crowd in the room went wild.  The integration with OpsMgr is very neat and gives you real good tools to work on your DPM server(s) easy, straight to the point and last but not least… FAST.

Role-based management

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You asked for it, you get it.  While you still need to be admin on the DPM box to be able to manage it, in the next version there will be different roles available for you to scope your DPM environment to the right people.  While the picture above will probably still be subject of change, I think it is clear that role-based administration is on the way, and that the combination of DPM role-based administration and OpsMgr integration…. Well, I think it speaks for itself Smile

Certificate Base Protection

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DPM 2010 already has workgroup support… With DPM 2012, this will be done by certificates, which is much easier to manage in larger environments and from a security point of view will be much more appreciated by the security people.  Oh yeah, and there will be support for workgroup clustering protection.

Tape Media Co-location

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In DPM 2012 you will have the possibility to co-locate multiple protection groups on one tape set… Yes, you have read that correctly Smile

SharePoint item-level recovery

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In DPM 2010 and with SharePoint 2010 you already had easy Item-Level Recovery.  (It is also possible with SharePoint 2007 but then you need the recovery farm)  It can take a while to recover a single item, but it’s there.  In 2012, they will enhance that experience and recover much faster then before.

Virtual DPM Enhancements

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You run DPM virtually?  (Which works well BTW) You can’t do item-level recovery of hyper-v because of this?  It’s coming now!

Generic Data Source Protection

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For me, this is one of the most exciting features.  This will open up DPM to every Microsoft workload as long as the product team will adapt this.  And they will need to do that.  As example, we were shown how Virtual Machine Manager has already leveraged this to protect the VMM database.  In the future, they will extend that with the protection of the VMM library so that you can protect VMM the same way as SharePoint.  One-box, one-click, and of you go.

Want more?

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Watch out for the future because more exciting things are coming.  Integration with Service Manager.  Powershell integration.

Should I wait to install DPM?

NO!  Start now by implementing DPM 2010 already.  The centralized management will be able to connect to your DPM 2010 boxes.  There is no need to wait because the product is ALREADY great, and with the upgrade track / side-by-side migrations and everything they will provide us with it will be easy to go to DPM 2012 when it is released.

If you have questions or want to know more about DPM, don’t hesitate to contact me through this blog or contact the Microsoft people.

 

Mike Resseler

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2011
    I am on 2007 right now, thinking about upgrading to 2010. Has there been any clue as to when 2012 will be released? If I buy the 2010 version today, what kind of licensing changes am I looking at in moving to 2012? We use it only for SQL data, so I would be buying E-DPML (think that is the term) licenses. One thing I hate about Microsoft, trying to decode licensing.

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2011
    DPM will probably be released in CY2011 You can purchase the licenses as: • Part of the SMSE / SMSD suite (Best buy if you are using multiple system center apps) • ECAL (dpm is part of that so then you don’t need to license it anymore) • Single E-DPML license o SQL requests an enterprise license so E-DPML is correct However, if you want to benefit to upgrade when the new version is ready, you should get SA on these licenses.

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2011
    Will DPM 2012 support Disk -> Disk -> Disk instead of just Disk -> Disk -> Tape?

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2012
    I wonder if i can have one primary DPM and 2 secondary DPM so that server 1 is protected by offsite server2 and server2 is protected by offsite server3...

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2012
    Currently have DPM 2007 and looking at upgrade costs, as 2007 will not protect Exchange 2010. I have read numerous licensing documents, blogs, wikis, web sites, forums, white papers etc. Have no idea what kind of licenses are needed. Is there a site I can go to and tell them what I have and they can tell me which licenses to purchase? TIA Rick