Data Protection Manager 2010 – Backup to [empty] Disk

When I transfered most of my VMs over to shared storage, I didn’t really have the time (or money) to build a respectable storage environment. Needless to say there are some VMs that are stored on non-redundant storage….but most are on at least a RAID1 volume. It was at this time I decided to install Data Protection Manager 2010 and start getting things backed up. Obviously I will be using backup-to-disk as 1. no tape drives or libraries and 2. not paying for cloud storage for a home environment.

The bit that I was confused about was adding storage – Don’t add disks into a DPM storage pool if you have the whole disk allocated with a volume – the operation will be successful, but you will not have any available space for DPM to allocate and use.

The way DPM B2D works is by allocating each replica its own individual volume then mapping it into the DPM directory. Here’s how it will look:

 

Each volume is mapped to the DPM directory – it’s a bit of a long winded path:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer\

The directory will also depend on which type of replica – in this case, these volumes all correspond to Hyper-V snapshots…but if you browse further down into the directory, it is a full snapshot of the VM storage – VHD and config files – as you would expect.

 

 

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