How to Prepare an Offsite replica with DPM 2010

Sometimes the need will arise to backup your DPM replicas to removable storage for whatever reason.  It might be so that you can recover your DPM server in case of a disaster or you might even want to use the replicas to seed another DPM server in a DPM 2 DPM 4 DR scenario.  Here is an extremely simple and effective way to accomplish that:

1. On your DPM Server open an Admin Command Prompt
2. Navigate to the DPM bin folder (usually C:\
   Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin\)
3. Execute dpmbackup -db
4. Execute dpmbackup -replicas
5. I prefer using robocopy to copy the data to USB (or any alternate) Storage like so: robocopy C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\ %destination% /e /b

What the above does is creates snapshots of the replica volumes and then mounts those read-only snapshots under the \Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy folder.  It is therefore a point in time replica which you can copy wherever you wish, be it disk or tape.  You can, of course, also use your favorite backup software to backup your replicas, just be sure to configure it to traverse mount points.

Backing up Hyper-V VMs using DPM with software VSS Providers

DPM is a terrific backup solution for the all-round Microsoft shop.  In my humble opinion it’s also one of the best ways to back up Hyper-V Virtual Machines.  It integrates beautifully with your SAN vendors hardware VSS providers, but if you don’t have the budget to splash out on the requisite SAN licenses, there is a way to do it in software.

The Challenge

When backing up VM’s residing on a CSV, you might run into the following DPM error message:

Failed to prepare a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) for backup as another backup using the same CSV is in progress. (ID 32612 Details: Unknown error (0x8007173d) (0x8007173D))

The Solution

1. Run the DSConfig.ps1 script (included below) on any node in your CSV containing cluster
2. This will create a file called DataSourceGroups.xml in the same folder that you executed the DSConfig.ps1 script
3. Copy DataSourceGroups.xml to the %programfiles%\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Config folder on your DPM Server
4. This file needs to be updated every time you create and protect a VM using DPM
5. If a protection group has already been created for the virtual machines, execute the Modify Protection Group Wizard. If a protection group has not been created, create a new protection group and the job serialization described above will take effect.

DSConfig.ps1 Script

The updated script can be downloaded from here

This will allow you to get rid of the pesky alerts and streamline your backup process.  The optimum solution would be to use a hardware VSS provider, but this is not always financially feasible, or if you have an iSCSI SAN.