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Hardware Requirements

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

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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

  • 1 GHz, dual-core CPU or faster

  • 2.33 GHz quad-core CPU

RAM

  • 4 GB

    For more information about how DPM manages memory, in the DPM 2010 Operations Guide, see DPM and Memory (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=148232).

  • 8 GB

Pagefile

  • 0.2 percent of the combined size of all recovery point volumes, 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, in the DPM 2010 Operations Guide, see Managing Performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=178445).

1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer

Disk space for DPM installation

  • DPM installation location: 3 GB

  • Database files drive: 900 MB

  • System drive: 1 GB

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.

  • 1.5 times the size of the protected data

    For more information about calculating capacity requirements and planning the configuration of the disks, in the DPM 2010 Deployment Guide, see Planning the Storage Pool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196873).

  • 2.5–3 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 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

See Also

Concepts

Network Requirements

Other Resources

DPM 2010 System Requirements
Software Requirements