Including, what I want to announce to the whole WORLD!!!!!! You do NOT need to add a whole disk to the DPM storage pool anymore! There is now what is called “Custom Volumes”, where you can create your own seperate partitions for the replica and recovery point areas, which then you specify for each PG/workload. This means you are now able to have 1, count them ONE, hard drive to run DPM! I know there are tons of people out there who even wanted to just *test and try* DPM, but couldn’t because they didn’t have the hardware requirement of 2 HDs…. not anymore, test to your hearts content!

 Oh, and BTW, there is a bug bash contest going on for Beta 2 – see Connect for details. Also, the beta is public, so that means anyone can still join the beta on Connect even to this day.

 Look for a lot of posts to come about DPM – most of the content covered in detail you will only find written by me!

Hope everyone signed up for the beta and will submit lots of bugs!

 =- Joseph Bittman DPM MVP

 Although the plan may be for it to be public right now, it could change in the future. Assuming it will be public though, it is almost 100% certain that the first details of the signup will be posted to the DPM web site at http://www.microsoft.com/dpm. – Check there often for any new details!

 =- Joseph Bittman DPM MVP

Quote from source:

“Among the exsiting DPM V1 customers we are looking for customers who want to participate in our beta for Service Pack 1. 

SP1 enables: 

• protection of 64 bit production servers  

• protection of production servers with Single Instance Store (SIS) enabled  

• allows for protection of clustered production servers  

• and has a roll up of all fixes

If interested in testing, shoot an email to dpmtb[at]microsoft.com”

Posted at blogs.technet.com/dpm by Marc Kamstrup.

Enjoy! – Joseph Bittman DPM MVP

Check out DPM and Windows 2003 R2 Datasheet and Data Protection in DPM and Windows Server 2003 R2 for details.

Be sure to visit the Microsoft CFS Team Blog to see other great articles on file services and storage features in Windows Server, Windows XP, and Windows Vista — be sure to leave comments too — they’re a really cool bunch of people (shameless plug — I’m one of their MVPs — but really, you should check it out)

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/04/14/425170.aspx

PatrickE

 ”The release time frame for SP1 is early summer of this year.”

Also about the beta build(s) of SP1: “There *might* be some paperwork (NDA) involved as this will be unreleased software. ”

 What does the NDA quote mean? Probably means that it may/may not be a private beta.

For everyone interested, SP1 will have the ability to *protect* x64 file servers, but the ability for the *DPM Server* to run x64 will be presented in V2. I sure hope that Virtual Server comes up to bat with x64 guest OSes by the time of V2′s beta!

Have questions? Drop a comment here or in the DPM NG at microsoft.public.dataprotectionamanger…

-JB MCSD.Net  -  DPM MVP

“…the next release of DPM is in H2 of 2007. We will have the beta
version with Exchange and SQL support (including support for multiple
domains) by summer of this year. Given where we are in the development
cycle, it is hard to give more exact dates.”

 Did you read that closely? – Beta version “by summer of this year”!!! Does that statement mean literally BY this summer (meaning pre-summer) or ‘by the end’? My gut level response would be somewhere DURING summer and not before, as it seems very early for another beta. But even if it occured late summer, that still is 1 year or more until RTM in 2007! What does this mean? – My guess, private beta.

Stay tuned!

-JB DPM MVP MCSD.Net

DPM File Agent service entered a running state.
DPM File Agent service was successfully sent a start control.
DPM File Agent service entered the stopped state.

  This behavior occurs on a frequent and definitely not designed basis.

 Anyone experiencing this problem should add a comment to this post and/or post in the DPM NG with details at microsoft.public.dataprotectionmanager… or the web UI through the Community page at microsoft.com/dpm. Please specify whether you recently installed any DPM or other product hotfixes. Thanks!

- Joseph Bittman MCSD.Net DPM MVP

Included in DPM V2 is support for Exchange and SQL Server. DPM will probably also have Multi-Domain support.

Exact quote from the DPM NG: “A beta for DPM V2 should be available later this year.” – Nirman

- Joseph Bittman DPM MVP | MCSD.Net

 What the symptoms look like:

#1 Access Denied Error in DPM UI

#2 For the more beefy details, I’ll leave it to my trusted friend, Karan, from DPM:

“The problem occurs because during a consistency check, both the long name
and the short name of each file must match. Short names are assigned
according to the order in which they are created. Therefore, the short names
of the files on the destination server may not match the short names of the
files on the source server. For example, this problem occurs in the
following scenario: . The LongFileName02.txt file is created on the source
server. The short name of the LongFileName02.txt file is LongFi~1.txt.
      . The LongFileName01.txt file is created on the source server. The
short name of the LongFileName01.txt file is LongFi~2.txt.
      . A consistency check is run. The files are validated by using the
long name in alphabetical order. The LongFileName01.txt file is validated
first.
      . A LongFileName01.txt file is created on the replica. This file is
given the LongFi~1.txt short name.
      . During the next synchronization, the LongFileName02.txt file is
created. The short name of this file is LongFi~2.txt.
In this scenario, the short names of LongFileName02.txt and
LongFileName01.txt are exchanged.

The next time that you run a consistency check, the synchronization fails
because the long name and the short name of each file do not match.
Therefore, the replica remains inconsistent with the source server.

I would recommend installing this hotfix on all DPM servers in production
where you are seeing this problem.”

——–

Now to go call to get it myself!

Joseph Bittman MCSD.Net DPM MVP