DPM Storage Calculator for Hyper-V Takes the Guesswork Out

Microsoft’s been hyping DPM 2010 as a much-improved solution for backing up Hyper-V.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that System Center Data Protection Manager is Microsoft’s disk-based backups solution.  It supports backing up the range of Microsoft’s applications:  Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Dynamics, and Hyper-V, in addition to regular servers and file shares. While disk-based backups solutions are undeniably cool and potentially a much superior solution over tape (for some uses), figuring out exactly how much disk space you’re going to need is the hardest part. Microsoft helps this task by providing the DPM Storage Calculator for Hyper-V.  Currently in draft form, this Excel spreadsheet gives you some basic calculations for planning DPM storage. Enter in your number of Hyper-V hosts, VMs, CSVs, along with VM sizing information and you’ll get some useful results in regards to how much storage space you’ll need.  Microsoft’s solution goes a step farther by adding in performance information as well.  By entering in read and write rates as well as bandwidth information, the tool can report on the anticipated amount of time required to complete initial replications.  It can also report on how much time is required to recover VMs and entire Hyper-V nodes. Grab your copy of this tool’s draft version here.  If DPM is your backup solution, you’ll appreciate the info it provides.   Looking for more of Greg’s tips and tricks?  Get ‘em at http://www.windowsitpro.com/categories/category/Virtualization/GregShieldsonVirtualization.aspx!