Setting up Disks and Agents in DPM 2.

   Setting up DPM 2 beta 1 is a breeze. Just ensure you have the minimum requirements. A bare minimum of 512 MB (1 GB recommended) is needed. It installs SQL 2005 SP1 so you know you don’t want to mess with that. Once installed you start the management window. We need to have at least one dynamic disk.You can add a huge san drive to the pool of disks as well. you do not need to format it. it will be formatted and mounted as a volume by DPM itself.  Installing Agents comes in next.

DPM agents: 
   It pushes the agent installation. It will auto discover the servers. Remember installing the agent on servers requires a reboot for the DPM agent to be initialized. (Oh the quintessential part of all MS installs. Don’t do that on a production DC or Member server, Trust me pink slips don’t look beautiful in a guys hand when its handed over from the management.) If you are upgrading from DPM 2006 don't because you cannot, at least in theis beta.That is what i saw.

Note: DPM 2 beta cannot be installed over DPM 2006 .I figured that and uninstalled that. I forgot to remove the agent so I removed it via add remove later when the agent didn’t install successfully.

I will write a little later about creating protection groups .

Cool links:

*  TechNet Webcast: Protecting Your Exchange Server with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) (Level 300)  

*  Protecting Exchange server with DPM ( A really Good PDF)

 "excerpt from the pdf."
Designed for Exchange Server

Because DPM was designed specifically for Exchange Server, DPM understands the advanced configurations of Exchange Server that often cause other data protection tools to fail:

When protecting Exchange Server clusters, DPM is not only "Exchange-savvy," but "cluster-competent." During deployment, DPM v2 is aware of the physical nodes, the cluster’s identity, and the virtual servers running within it. DPM v2 will help you ensure that the DPM agent is on all clustered nodes to maximize protection of the Exchange data. And when Microsoft Cluster Services changes the Exchange Server to a different clustered-node, DPM v2 will continue to help protect the virtual Exchange server without administrator intervention.

* When deploying Exchange 2007 LCR (Local Continous Replication) clusters, DPM is LCR aware and 
   protects the active database.

* When deploying Exchange 2007 CCR (Clustered Continous Replication) clusters, DPM is CCR aware and 
   enables "Preferred Node Backup" – allowing the passive copy to be protected and eliminate any I/O 
   impact from the active Exchange server.

Older backup applications require brick-level backups if you want to do brick-level restore (like a mailbox), which significantly increases the size of the backup disks or tapes. Because DPM v2 was built by Microsoft for Microsoft applications like Exchange, we made sure that isn’t necessary. DPM can protect a Storage Group, but restore a storage group, a database, a public folder, or even a single mailbox. DPM also minimizes backup-related performance impact by offloading the typical ESEUTIL operations that most backup applications force on the production server. Instead, the DPM server handles this on the redundant data, lightening the load on the production Exchange Server so that it can serve more users.