Protecting workloads

Protecting workloads in Azure using DPM is very similar to protecting the same workloads on premises. This section covers the key aspects of protecting workloads in Azure and highlights differences from your on-premises experience that you might encounter. Whether in Azure or on-premises, protecting workloads requires two key steps:

1.Discovering servers and installing the agent

2.Discovering workloads and creating a protection group


Discovering servers and installing the agent
DPM depends on the Active Directory domain controller for server discovery. It queries the domain controller and gets a list of servers that are joined to the same domain as the DPM server. From this list, you can select one or more servers that have workloads needing protection and install the backup agent on those servers. This process is simple and is preferred by the majority of customers using DPM. This process is applicable to the workloads in Azure too; the workloads in Azure and the DPM instance in Azure need to share the same domain.

Typical customer deployments also employ Azure Virtual Network to partition and classify the VMs into access groups and control the external access. With Azure Virtual Network, you can provision private networks in Azure and optionally connect these to your on-premises datacenters to form a hybrid deployment. With an Azure virtual network in place, DPM should be a part of the virtual network to get access to the workloads it needs to protect.

DPM should be able to discover servers without problems if the VM is connected to the correct Azure virtual network and is joined to the proper domain. Start the agent installation workflow in the DPM console by completing the following steps:

1.Click the Management tab at the bottom-left corner.

2.Click Agents in the left pane. This opens the list of servers with the agent installed andthe menu bar options to modify the list of installed agents.

3.Click Install in the top-left corner of the DPM console.

4. As a part of the agent installation workflow, DPM discovers the other servers in the same domain. Select the server you need to install the agent on from the list of servers discovered.


Discovering workloads and creating a Protection Group
When the agent is installed on the selected servers, you can protect the workloads running on those servers by creating a Protection Group. The Protection Group is a set of data sources that are configured to have the same backup configuration parameters, such as time of backup, synchronization frequency, retention period, and whether the backup data should be written to other media, like cloud and tape. The data sources can be simple files and folders or workload-specific entities, such as Microsoft SQL Server databases and Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. Any given data source can be a part of only one Protection Group, but a Protection Group can manage multiple data sources.

Complete the following steps to select and protect data sources:
1. Click the Protection tab at the bottom-left corner.

2. On the menu bar, click New to trigger the creation of a new Protection Group. A wizard appears to guide you through the process of protecting data sources.

3. On the Select Group Members page, select the data that you want to protect with this Protection Group. Browse through the servers on which you have installed the backup agent and select the objects that you want to include for protection.

4. Ensure that you also select the I Want Online Protection option on the Select Data Protection Method page. This ensures that you can continue tiering data to Azure Backup and keep the storage footprint of the DPM VM to a minimum.

5. Continue to the end of the wizard to finish creating the Protection Group.

With this procedure complete, you have successfully selected the Azure workloads to be protected and have created a Protection Group to encapsulate them.


Workloads and configurations supported for backup
While the experience of using DPM in Azure is very similar to the on-premises experience, the workloads that are supported for protection by DPM in Azure are a little different. This is fundamentally because the workloads and configurations that Azure supports are different from the workloads and configurations that are supported on-premises on Windows Server or Hyper-V. For example, at the time of writing this chapter, Microsoft Exchange is not a supported workload in Azure. By extension, backup of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes is not a supported scenario for DPM running in Azure. While there is no hard block in the software, planning the backup strategy for your Azure infrastructure needs a clear understanding of what support you will get from Microsoft.

The list of workloads supported by Azure is a continuously evolving one. You can find the latest and up-to-date information at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2721672. Additionally, the detailed list of workloads, versions, and capabilities supported by DPM can be found in the TechNet documentation at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj860400.aspx.

Source of Information : Microsoft System Center