ifstat wrote:

Is anyone using Microsoft DPM with a DR Site built? How do you replicate from site-site and what is the recovery process that you use?

I have read TR-3900, but it explains that two DPM servers are required and 1 must be virtual. I was wondering if there is an alternative method or if i can reduce the number of servers to 1 virtual.

We are trying to design a solution that integrates with NetApp SnapShot and Snapmirror.

Curious to hear your feedback.

Actually the two DPM servers were used for a specific reason. In this case it was put in so that you could choose to move the second DPM server to the second site without having to force every server to move with it. If you use a single DPM server, then if the DPM server moves from Site 1 to Site 2, all backups on site 1 will stop since the bandwidth likely wont support long distance backups. With that said, you can absolutely deploy a single DPM server, but you can only have that VM up on one of the two sites at a time. DPM is highly AD intergrated and you cant have two machines with same name and server operational in the infrastructure. Whichever way you go, the DPM server that you want to be portable should be inside of a VM as that is the easy way to transport a working DPM server from site to site. Use SnapManager for Hyper-V and it will take a good snapshot of the Boot drive of the VM, and use a Port Process scritp to allow SnapDrive (via SDCLI) to kick off the Snapshots of all of the DPM data volumes. The snapmanager will allow you to force the dr site update via a Mirror update once the snaps are complete. I hope this helps, I can help more if you have more specific 'how-to' questions. I will be at the NetApp booth at MMS2011 next week, and at StorageNetworkingWorld in San Jose on April 4th. Also feel free to contact my at my email address lionetti(@)netapp.com. -Lionetti