Welcome to the public Release Candidate for Data Protection Manager 2010

 Please download the Release Candidate and try it for yourself. 

 If you have questions or feedback go to the DPM newsgroup here.

Overview

This management pack supports monitoring of Windows Server Hyper-V systems. This includes monitoring coverage of Hyper-V host servers, including critical services and disks, and Hyper-V virtual machines, including virtual components and virtual hardware.

Feature Summary
This management pack provides the following functionality:

Management of critical Hyper-V services that affect virtual machines and host server functionality

Management of host server logical disks that affect virtual machine health

Full representation of virtualization in a single Hyper-V host server, including virtual networks, virtual machines, and guest computers

Monitoring of virtual machine hardware components that affect availability
Release History

6/19/2009 – Original release of the English version, version 6.0.6633.0

Download here..

Because storage migration is a real feature what comes with SCCVMM R2 RC, I can’t wait to test it. The release candidate is on its way and should get released any moment now. Below one more time what storage migration includes:

Storage Migration

We’ve heard from customers as well as field for the need for migrating storage of a running VM. This is especially relevant as customers migrate from their existing one VM per LUN deployments and consolidate their VMs into a single CSV (clustered shared volume) LUN when they upgrade to Windows 2008 Server R2. With VMM R2, we’ve added the capability to do what we call “Quick Storage Migration”. This feature enables migration of a VM’s storage both within the same host and across hosts while the VM is running with a minimum of downtime. The downtime depends on the amount of activity going on in the VM at the time of migration, our tests have shown typical downtimes to be less than 2 mins.

We’ve also added the capability to do VMWare storage vMotion which allows the storage of a VM to be transferred while the VM remains on the same host with no downtime.

http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/archive/2009/05/11/scvmm-r2-rc-features.aspx

The next version of System Center Data Protection Manager

The next version of Data Protection Manager, for now they call it DPM v3, is scheduled for 2010. It brings some cool features which lowers the administrative overhead. Back in the early days, the beta of DPM 2007, where manual resyncs where sometimes needed to keep the data in sync. Now DPM v3 brings self-healing and auto retry improvements which helps with this issue. Also protecting SQL Servers on a per instance basis. Meaning when adding a new database it gets protected without intervention. At least if you want this. Also new improvements on client protection. Laptops can be backupped over VPN and copies only unique user data and not the whole OS. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 are supported. For Windows 7 and Vista integration with local shadow copies giving the end user online and offline restore capabilities. “Role based restore” is an overall feature which can also be used for SQL restores.

Below some highlights:

Improvements on MS Application Protection for Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server and now also for Dynamics AX and SAP (running on SQL Server)

• Improvements on the virtualization part which gives a rich set of features for Hyper-V protection like:
  • Live migration and restore
  • Mount to alternate hosts
• Improvements on the client platform which gives more backup en end user restore possibilities.
• More scalability with larger sources (1000 SQL DBs+ per DPM server), auto-discovery and auto protection.
• More reliability with self-healing and auto retry improvements for the data sources.
• DPM to DPM replication which gives more chaining, failover and recoverability improvements.

Main features on a per product basis:

Figure 1:
 

Figure 2:

More to come on this fine product!