We are planning to upgrade our Hyper-V 2012 cluster to R2. What is required for DPM 2012 in order to protect its virtual servers (host-level backups)?

/Amir

Hi,

DPM 2012 R2 fully supports protecting Windows 2012 R2 hyper-V server clusters.  No special requirements.

This is quite funny because we made a test yesterday with protecting a VM from DPM 2012 R2, and we got a fully working recovery point out of that attempt. However, on the Monitor tab -> Detail -> Affected area it says \offline\server_name for any of the virtual servers I choose to protect. I first thought this was the "new" name for Child partition vs. Saved State, but the "offline" status is the same for any VM, whether they are online or not.

/Amir

Hi,

You are correct, the caption has changed from backup using child partition or saved state to online and offline respectfully.  This is determined by the Windows Hyper-V writer on the host at time of protection.  You can view the current caption by running the following command on the Hyper-V host(s)

C:\>DiskShadow.exe

Diskshadow >  List writers

In the output - look for the Hyper-V Writer section and each guest will have a caption - this is what DPM uses for description at the time of protection - that can change but the DPM UI will always show the caption state at the time of protection.

Thank you Mike!

/Amir

You need to update the Integration Components on the guest VMs before it will switch to Online.

Hi Mike,

Need to ask you this as I can see you're a MS employee. From DPM 2012 R2 on there's apparently no support for guest level backups on Windows Server 2003 systems any longer. I guess this messes up the situation for a lot of companies, so my question is if Microsoft's Product team is planning to release a QFE in order to bring back the W2K3 support in DPM 2012 R2?

Thanks.

/Amir

Hi Mike,

Regarding the DPM UI, does the DPM UI caption gets updated very time backup run?

• If the DPM UI shows "\Offline\ServernameB" on the initial backup, does this mean DPM does Offline backup every single time, even if the caption on the ServernameB on the host has changed to Online?

• Or does DPM backup uses the caption on the host itself to run Online or Offline?  But not the caption info on the DPM UI?
• Does the DPM UI ever get the caption up-to-date to match with the caption on the host(s)?

Thank you.

Hi,

The caption in the DPM UI is only a description of the data source at the time of protection.  It has nothing to do in what state the guest will be backed up in, it can vary from backup to backup based on the conditions inside the guest.  The DPMUI will not change (unless you stop protection and re-protect) even if the type of backup supported for the guest changes.