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Install DPM as a virtual machine on an on-premises Hyper-V server

 

Published: December 7, 2015

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

You can install System Center 2012 R2 - Data Protection Manager (DPM) as a virtual computer that is running on an on-premises Hyper-V server. For information about how to install DPM, see Install System Center 2012 R2 - DPM.

For a DPM server that’s running on a Hyper-V virtual machine, the following conditions apply:

  • We don’t recommend that you use a Virtual DPM installation for scaled-up environments. Instead, use “direct attached”/SAN-based storage.

  • If you have to use physical disks in a DPM storage pool, you must use Hyper-V pass-through disks.

  • The following kinds of disk configuration are supported as a DPM storage pool:

    • A pass-through disk that has host direct-attached storage (DAS).

    • A pass-through iSCSI LUN that is attached to host.

    • A pass-through FC LUN that is attached to host.

  • There's no size limit for .vhdx, which is used in DPM storage pool.

  • Both fixed .vhdx files and dynamically expanding .vhdx files are supported.

  • Both .vhd and .vhdx files are supported.

  • A DPM 2012 R2 server that has update rollup 3 or a later update rollup installed supports tape drives by using synthetic FC.

  • For dynamic and fixed virtual hard disks, you can store the .vhd and .vhdx files on remote SMB shares. A virtual DPM installation is required to support adding virtual hard drives to the storage pool.

  • For high-availability DPM storage, virtual hard disks should be placed on Scale-Out File Servers (SOFS). SMB 3.0 is required for scaled-out file servers. For more information, see Scale-Out File Server for Application Data overview. SOFS takes advantage of Windows Server failover clustering and SMB 3.0.

  • Performance can decrease in a scaled-up environment (such as a Hyper-V environment that uses CSV) that uses .vhdx files as compared to using SAN storage. Therefore, we don’t recommend that you use .vhdx for scaled-up environments.

  • To enable deduplication on DPM VHDs, the VHDs must reside on an SOFS. Also, the dedup window (that specifies when dedup should run) must not overlap the DPM backup windows. For more information, see Deduplicate DPM storage

  • Virtual DPM doesn't support the following configuration:

    • Windows 2012 Storage Spaces

    • Virtual hard drives that are built on top of storage spaces

    • Local or remote hosting of .vhdx files on Windows 2012 storage spaces

    • Windows 2012 iSCSI targets (that use virtual hard disks) as a DPM storage pool

    • NTFS compression for volumes that host .vhd files that are used in the DPM storage pool

    • Bitlocker on volumes that host .vhd files that are used for the storage pool

    • A native 4 KB sector size of physical disks for .vhdx files in the DPM storage pool

    • Virtual hard disk that are hosted on Windows 2008 servers