How to migrate data between DPM disks

I received a lot of questions regarding how to migrate data between disks in the storage pool so I decided to write a blog post explaining how you can migrate data from disk A to disk B present in the DPM diskpool. There are also some difference between DPM 2010 and DPM 2012.

There are three different ways of doing this, you can migrate:

1.       Disk to disk
2.       Data source to DPM disk
3.       Data source to custom volume

In this blog post I will cover the first step, migrating from DPM disk to DPM disk.

There are also some different scenarios where this comes in hand. The first obvious is when System Center Operations Manager monitors the disk hardware that is used for the DPM diskpool and you will be receiving alerts that indicates that the hardware is starting to enter a failure state.

The second scenario is when your warranty period is near its end and you need to replace the disk in the DPM diskpool.

In both scenarios you will use the DPM PowerShell and the PS1 called MigrateDatasourceDataFromDPM.PS1.

Open DPM Management Shell present on you desktop or in your start menu:

 

The first step you must do is to collect all the information regarding the present disks in the DPM diskpool for the current DPM server. This is done by typing the following syntax:

$disk = Get-DPMDisk –DPMServerName DPMSERVERNAME

 

You will now have all the disks present in $disk

 

Remember that the value $disk is indexed and you need to start with the value 0 to get the first value of the array. To migrate data from $disk[2] to $disk[0] type the following syntax:

MigrateDatasourceDataFromDPM.ps1 –DPMServerName DPMSERVERNAME –Source $disk[2] –Destination $disk[0]

 

When the script has finished you should go to the Monitor area and use the filter All job’s in progress to monitor the Post-recovery operation job that will run after you have migrated data sources from one disk to another in the DPM diskpool. The migrated disk will automatically be deleted from the DPM GUI.

 

One thing that is important to now is that you are able to migrate your replica volumes directly but the recovery point volumes needs to be timed out on you old hardware. This means that you cannot remove the physical disk before your retention time of the data sources has been timed out by the retention time value present in the protection group configuration.

Every night a maintenance script will run that will update the replica volume with the oldest recovery point volume data. Eventually the old data present in the old recovery point volumes will be timed out and removed; you can then safely remove the physical or virtual hardware.