Protecting Exchange 2010 DAGs with DPM 2010

The new DPM 2010 (DPM v3), of course, has support for Exchange 2010 databases protected by a Database Availability Group (DAG) as can be seen from the below screenshot (which needs to have the Exchange logo updated BTW).

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When backing up DAG protected databases, it’s recommend to perform the Eseutil integrity check for the log files only.

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DPM 2010 can even perform backups of multiple copies of the same database.

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Below the initial replica of each database is being created.

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Here we can see informational alerts about the jobs currently running.

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We have now created the first replica successfully and therefore also flushed the log files on each DB copy in the DAG.

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Windows Server Backup 2008 SP2 or R2 together with the VSS plug-in included with Exchange 2010 can also backup DAG protected databases, but only via the active database copy. And since the VSS plug-in (like DPM 2010) doesn’t have any intelligence built in to detect which Exchange 2010 Mailbox server holds the active database copy, managing backups of DAG protected databases can quickly become cumbersome.

Recovering databases are also very similar to previous versions of DPM.

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Recovering data from Exchange 2010 databases.

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But we still need to recover the whole database holding the particular mailbox we want to recover.

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Or you can recover at the database level.

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Note the third option below. As we no longer have the concept of storage groups in Exchange 2010, we also don’t have recovery storage groups (RSGs). We now have so called recovery databases (RDBs) to which we can restore and mount databases. We can then merge content from mailboxes in the recovery database to the production database as needed.

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You should of course not use this DPM 2010 beta version in production, but it’s good to have an alternative to WSB and the VSS plug-in for backing up your Exchange 2010 lab environments. As you can see below we can restore on the mailbox level.

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture
MCITP: EMA + EA | MCSE: M + S | TechNet Influent

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