This chapter is designed to provide you with skills and techniques for dealing with post-installation and management tasks for your Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) server. After reading this chapter, you will have the knowledge to carry out common DPM management activities, such as using the DPM console, configuring storage, creating custom reporting, working with SQL self service, and many more tasks.

The following recipe provides an overview of the Microsoft System Center DPM Administrator Console; it includes a tour of the console, describes the console layout, and explains where you can find the controls for performing general administrative tasks. This recipe also includes an overview of the five task areas of the Administrator Console and their associated functions.

The DPM Administrative Console is the central management tool for DPM. It provides a consolidated interface that gives you immediate access to the Monitoring, Protection, Recovery, Reporting, and Management task areas. The task areas themselves are a set of logically related...

Starting with Microsoft System Center 2016 DPM, Microsoft introduced a new feature called Modern Backup Storage (MBS). MBS is supported when DPM is installed on Windows Server 2016 or later. MBS helps to reduce the overall backup storage space, and Microsoft claims this is by a factor of around 50%. It also reduces the amount of I/O and the load placed on the backup server by using Resilient File System (ReFS) technology, which is available in Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019.

Configuring DPM agent throttling in Microsoft System Center DPM allows you to restrict the amount of network bandwidth consumed by DPM during the execution of a backup synchronization job. Managing network bandwidth helps to ensure that DPM is not using all the available bandwidth and there is sufficient bandwidth available to support other applications. However, there is an impact when you start to manage bandwidth usage and that is that the backup synchronization jobs themselves will take longer to execute. 

Microsoft System Center DPM manages network bandwidth at the agent level. When managing network bandwidth usage, start to think about limiting the...

Optimizing the protection group in Microsoft System Center DPM allows you to reduce the amount of data being transferred over the wire during replica creation, backup synchronization, consistency check operations, and recovery jobs, through the use of compression. This has the advantage of allowing more data throughput with less overall impact to your network's performance. However, enabling this option will add additional CPU load to both your DPM server and the server you are protecting.

Filters in Microsoft System Center DPM allow you to query the result of jobs executed or scheduled in a number of varying ways. Filters are simply SQL queries that present the results of the fetched data to the DPM Admin Console. You can also go ahead and define your own custom filters, and these results appear under the custom filters option in the Action pane of the Admin Console.

You can filter jobs by using the following criteria by default:

• All jobs
• All jobs in progress
• Failed jobs for yesterday and today
• Today's jobs

You can configure Microsoft System Center DPM to subscribe to notifications and reports via email. If you decide to enable either of these features, you will need to configure a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server that you want DPM to use to send email.

You can subscribe to alert notifications and to reports by email. If you plan to enable either of these features, do the following:

1. Set up the SMTP server
2. Subscribe to email notifications

The following steps will guide you through how to configure...

Applying updates to your Microsoft System Center DPM server is important: updates keep your DPM server and any protected servers up to date. You may have a preferred mechanism for deploying updates; however, DPM updates are automatically available through Microsoft Update.

Microsoft System Center DPM updates for Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) are available through Microsoft Update. Microsoft Update delivers these updates from the Microsoft Update Catalog, which is a repository for Microsoft software updates that is managed and maintained by Microsoft. You can download these updates automatically or manually from the following link: https://www.catalog.update...