For those of you who have used DPM 2007, you'll know that if you wanted to provide Bare Metal Recovery protection you had to install a second piece of software called the DPM System Recovery Tool (SRT). This then meant you potentially needed more hardware and then you find that you could only protect Windows Server 2003. Well things have now changed in DPM 2010, it is now integrated into the DPM product and you can provide BMR protection from within the same DPM console as you would protect anything else.
"Bare metal recovery is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure."
The quote above nicely describes what Bare Metal Recovery is. After a catastrophic failure, you can use BMR to restore the system back to a previous state. Where BMR is different from System State is that it protects pretty much everything everything whereas System State will only protect system specific data which includes the registry, COM+ class registration and boot and system files as well as the certificate and AD databases if applicable.
So, back to DPM 2010 and BMR. As I stated earlier, this is now much simpler in DPM 2010 as you can protect the system in just the same way as you provide any other protection.
As you can see from the image above, just select Bare Metal Recovery under System Protection and away you go. All other settings are the same as protecting any other data source. Much easier than having to install a separate piece of software with a different console to provide this protection :-)
Next question then is, "well, how does it perform a bare metal backup?", and this is quite simple as it uses Windows Server Backup. Windows Server 2008 Backup (and its command line interface wbadmin.exe) are the new block-level backup infrastructure built into Microsoft's latest operating systems. This provides a block-level volume image based solution to providing system protection. DPM 2010 will use Windows Server Backup to generate the backup file locally and then protect that file. One thing to note here is that you will need sufficient space on the server to store the backup file; refer to my System State backup article for more details, http://www.scdpmonline.org/server-2008-system-state-backup.aspx. The biggest limitation of DPM using Windows Server 2008 Backup is that you can only perform a bare metal backup on servers with Windows Server Backup installed, ie Windows Server 2008+.
This is another one of the many improvements in DPM 2010 !
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David Allen
MVP System Center Operations Manager
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