Hi, everyone! Last fall, we moved to Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 to protect both our physical and virtual workloads. We’ve opted to install an agent in each virtual machine. I’ll start by saying that, in general, DPM has been a good choice. With DPM’s continuous data protection capability, we were able to recover our primary ERP database from disaster in the middle of the workday with almost no data loss.
However, we are less than satisfied with DPM’s Exchange recovery process; it’s extremely complicated and not intuitive at all. Further, although we were conservative in our disk space estimates, were finding that DPM’s lack of dedupe capability has made it a bit more of a challenge than initially expected.
But, we’re not ditching DPM. Instead, we’re adding Veeam Backup and Replication to our data protection arsenal. With most of our environment now running under VMware, we can better leverage this excellent backup tool. Last fall, we still had a number of physical servers. Now, we have very few left. For those, we’ll continue to use DPM, but for the virtual environment, we’ll migrate to Veeam. Recovery is easy; dedupe is there.
As usual, as we move forward in our implementation, I’ll be reporting back.