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Hardware Requirements

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Applies To: Data Protection Manager, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 requires a disk that is dedicated to the storage pool and a disk that is dedicated to the following:

  • System files

  • DPM installation files

  • DPM prerequisite software

  • DPM database files

Note

You can install DPM on the same volume that the operating system is installed on, or you can install DPM on a different volume that does not include the operating system. However, you cannot install DPM on the disk that is dedicated to the storage pool, which is a set of disks on which the DPM server stores the replicas and recovery points for the protected data.

DPM owns and manages the disks in the storage pool, which must be dynamic. For purposes of DPM, disk is defined as any disk device manifested as a disk in Disk Management. For more information about the types of disks that the storage pool supports and how to plan your disk configuration, see Planning the Storage Pool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91965).

If you want to manage your own additional disk space, DPM enables you to attach or associate custom volumes to data sources that you are protecting in a protection group. Custom volumes can be on basic or dynamic disks. Any volume that is attached to the DPM server can be selected as a custom volume; however, DPM cannot manage the space in custom volumes. Note that this release of DPM 2007 will not delete any existing volumes on the disk attached to the storage pool to make the entire disk space available.

Note

If you have critical data that you want to store, you can use a high-performance logical unit number (LUN) on a storage area network rather than the DPM-managed storage pool.

The following table lists the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the DPM server. For more information about planning DPM server configurations, see Planning for DPM Deployment (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91848).

Note

For better performance, we recommend that you install DPM on a 64-bit computer.

Component Minimum Requirement Recommended Requirement

Processor
  • 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster.
  • 2.33 GHz quad-core CPUs

Memory
  • 2 gigabytes (GB) RAM

    For more information about how DPM manages memory, see DPM and Memory (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=97938).
  • 4 GB RAM

Pagefile
  • 0.2 percent the size of all recovery point volumes combined, in addition to the recommended size (generally, 1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer).

    For more information about configuring the DPM pagefile size, in the DPM Operations Guide see Managing Performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91859).

 N/A  

Disk space for DPM installation
  • Program files drive: 410 megabytes (MB).

  • Database files drive: 900 MB.

  • System drive: 2650 MB.

Note

The system drive disk space requirement is necessary if you chose to install the instance of SQL Server from the DPM download package. If you are using an existing instance of SQL Server, this disk space requirement is considerably less.
  • 2–3 GB of free space on the program files volume

Note

DPM requires 600 MB of free space in the recovery point volume and a minimum of 300 MB of free space on each protected volume for the change journal. Additionally, before archiving data to tape, DPM copies the file catalog to a DPM temporary installation location; therefore, we recommend that the volume on which DPM is installed contains 2–3 GB of free space.

Disk space for storage pool

Note

The storage pool does not support Universal Serial Bus (USB)/1394 disks.
  • 1.5 times the size of the protected data.

    For more information about calculating capacity requirements and planning the configuration of the disks, in Planning a DPM 2007 Deployment see Planning the Storage Pool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91965).
  • 2–3 times the size of the protected data

Logical unit number (LUN)

 N/A  
  • Maximum of 17 TB for GUID partition table (GPT) dynamic disks

  • 2 TB for master boot record (MBR) disks

Note

These requirements are based on the maximum size of the disk as it appears to the Windows Server operating system.

The following table lists the data source limits that a DPM server can protect (if it meets the minimum hardware requirements) and the recommended disk space required per DPM server.

Platform Data source limit Recommended disk space

32-bit computers

150 data sources.

We recommend approximately 50 servers and 75 clients fanning into a single DPM server.

10 TB

Note

There is a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) non-paged pool limitation on x86 32-bit operating systems. If you are protecting data using a secondary DPM server, the recommended disk space is only 6 TB.

64-bit computers

300 data sources

Data sources are typically spread across approximately 75 servers and 150 client computers.

45 TB

See Also

Concepts

Network Requirements
Security Requirements

Other Resources

Software Prerequisites