Hardware Requirements
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
Did you know that System Center 2012 is available? System Center 2012 offers you a single, flexible platform to manage traditional datacenters, private and public clouds, and client computers and devices. Learn more about System Center 2012.
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 must be installed on a 64-bit computer and 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, in the DPM 2010 Planning Guide, see Planning the Storage Pool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196873).
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 DPM 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 a DPM 2010 Deployment (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184688).
| Component | Minimum requirement | Recommended requirement |
|---|---|---|
Processor |
|
|
RAM |
|
|
Pagefile |
|
1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer |
Disk space for DPM installation |
Note The system drive disk space requirement is necessary if you choose to install the dedicated instance of SQL Server from DPM Setup. If you use a remote instance of SQL Server, this disk space requirement is considerably less. |
Note DPM requires 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. |
|
|
Logical unit number (LUN) |
N/A |
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 for the DPM server.
| Platform | Data source limit | Recommended disk space |
|---|---|---|
64-bit computers |
600 volumes, of which 300 are replica volumes and 300 are recovery point volumes Data sources are typically spread across approximately 75 servers and 150 client computers. |
80 TB per DPM server, with a maximum recovery point size of 40 TB |