System Center Data Protection Manager

We need your help!… on SCDPM tape features

Although we don’t know the release date yet, we are getting closer to the Release of System Center Data Protection Manager 2012.  And this time, we need your help.  The (former) SCDPM MVP’s are looking for your help.  We need YOU to give us information / requests / whatever… on what the SCDPM product team can do to improve the tape management in SCDPM.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We are going to gather all your feedback and get it to the product team.

You can find more information on http://robertanddpm.blogspot.com/2012/02/tape-management-improvements.html and you can always get the info through this blog.  I will make sure that we get it to the right people.

Thanks for helping!

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings (this post)

Recap

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series. I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

In the second post we did some pre-work like creating a management pack specific for this solution and a knowledge base article to give some additional “power” to our solution.

The third post handled the workflow that we needed to build in Orchestrator.

The fourth post handled the preparations in Service Manager such as creating a connector and synchronize it.

In the fifth post we created two types of templates.

In this last post, we are going to create the actual offerings for our HR friends…

Ok… Offerings?

Yeah.  Since we are giving our HR friends some services through a self-service portal, we give them a service offering…

To be able to do that, we need to build two “offerings”.  A Service Offering and a Request Offering.  If you are wondering why we need two different offerings, here is the explanation:

A Request Offering is one offer.  It is what we are building here.  A Service Offering could be one Request Offering or multiple offerings together.  So let’s say that we will build more specific request offerings for our HR friends after this one, then we will be able to reuse the Service Offering we are going to build today.

Service Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Service Catalog -> Service Offerings. Then, in the task pane click Create Service Offering

Press Next in the first window of the wizard

Fill in the Title, Category (this is crucial for where you will see it in the portal), overview, description and as usual, make sure that you select the right management pack. Note that I didn’t fill in the language. If you chose a specific language, then this service offering will only be visible if the internet explorer is actually running in that language (so handle with care here )

In the detailed information, you can add SLA and Cost information. This is again something you don’t need to fill in but it gives a lot of added value to your solution.  And this is exactly what decision takers (non-technical) want to see.  This proves that your solution covers everything and is not just another technical solution.

In this window you can add specific services that are related to this offering. Services such as (for example) email that are created in SCSM (maybe through OpsMgr) can be added here.

In the next screen, you can add knowledge articles to this offering. We didn’t create a knowledge article specifically for the service offering but if you had, you would be able to add it here

Now we can add a Request Offering to our Service Offering. Because we didn’t create this yet (this will be our next step) we leave this empty for now

Finally we decide to put this into draft (which then can go through a change process) or just publish it right away with the service offering owner and some notes

Look at the review to see if you made any mistakes and click Create

When the offering has been created, press Close. Please note that you won’t see this in the portal until the first request offering has been made

Create Request Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Request Offerings

In the Tasks Pane, press Create Request Offering

Press Next in the first window of the wizard

Fill in the Title, choose an image (this is a nice add-on and is a quick-win for IT because of the improvement of visibility), add the description and as always, select the correct management pack.

On the same window, press the select template and then choose service request (remember the service request we have created earlier!)

Select the correct service request

Press Next

Now we need to fill in the prompts. The prompts are the questions that the user will get and which he needs to fill in (although the prompts can be required, optional or even just “viewable”)

For more information about the different prompt types: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/11/08/request-offering-wizard-overview.aspx

In our case, we need 3 prompts: The user name, the group name and the reason for this. We are going to configure user name and group name with query results (again, for more info, see above link) and reason as a simple text. The end-result should be that the end-user selects the user, then selects the group, fills in a reason (which will be in the service request ticket) and that the username and groupname get passed to orchestrator

In the next part, we need to configure the prompts. We are going to choose the first one (username) and then select the configure button

A new window appears, and this will allow us to form a query based on a class.

For this case, I want to select the Active Directory User class, but it wasn’t visible in the previous screen. The reason is that by default it goes to frequently used classes. I’ve changed that to All basic classes and now I can choose it. Please note also that there is a combined class which makes this even more powerful

Next step for the query is to configure my criteria. In this case, it is not necessary but you could limit your results here based on many criteria (depending on the class you select)

Third part is what you want to display. Remember that I had to have the DN name for a user in the Orchestrator workflow. If I wanted to make it myself easy, I could show that here, but then the end-user would get confused. So I decided to display the Display Name only

Finally I get some Options to chose.

Because I need to map this to my runbook, I select Add user-selected objects to template object as related items and them choose Add a User to a Group (Runbook Automation Activity) to pass it through to the runbook variables

Do the same for Group Name but now select on Active Directory Group

Now that my prompts are configured, I need to map them. Two of them are already done (because I mapped them before to the runbook but the third one (the reason) still needs to be mapped to a field in the request

Here you can see that I map it on the Service Request and into the notes (as additional information)

Remember the nice knowledge article we build? Well, here it is, just add it to the request offering

And finally we can publish it

Fill in the owner, notes

Review the summary

Finished but not just yet .  One more thing to do, and that is add this specific request offering to the service offering we build before…

Add to Service Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Service Catalog -> Request offerings.

Select the correct offering and then in Tasks choose Add to Service Offering

Select the correct service offering and press OK. You are done

And with that, the series come to an end.  Hope you enjoyed it.

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates

The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates (this post)
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

Recap

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series. I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

In the second post we did some pre-work like creating a management pack specific for this solution and a knowledge base article to give some additional “power” to our solution.

The third post handled the workflow that we needed to build in Orchestrator.

The fourth post handled the preparations in Service Manager such as creating a connector and synchronize it.

This post will be about creating the templates in Service Manager.

Huh? Templates?

In Service Manager, each time you create an incident or change or problem or… you are using a template.  After the installation, when you have nothing customized, then you use the “default” template.  When you are enjoying the program for a longer period, you will create specific templates for specific incidents.  An example.  Imagine that you get a lot of incidents for resetting users passwords.  (Sounds familiar? )  If your service desk needs to fill in the same information again and again (like: which tier needs to handle it, which priority and so on…) they would love a template that already contains that information pre-filled.  So if you build such a template (let’s call it the password-forget-template) then the service desk can choose that specific template each time an incident needs to be logged and automatically most of the information is pre-filled.  That will be a huge time-saver for your service desk.

With a bit of imagination you can build some serious strong templates that save your service desk, yourself and your users a lot of time…

In this post, we are going to build 2 templates.  One template will be a automation activity.  Let me try to explain what that is…  Let’s take a change request as an example.  Most change requests have some activities associated with them.  Activities such as approving (by a CAB for instance) and manual activities are the most known.  Within Service Manager, you can define those activities in your incidents, changes and so on.  We are going to build an automation activity as a template. This means  we can reuse that in other templates (again, incidents, changes, service requests and so on…)  Because it is automated, that means that it will automatically run, with no user interaction and most of the time, it will require some parameters.

The second template is going to be a service request template.  A service request is exactly what the word says… A service request .  This template is the one we are going to use when a user (our HR person) is going to do the request and which we are going to prefill with data.

All right, let’s start building

The automation activity template

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Runbooks.

Select the correct runbook.  In my case, this is Add User to Group (which is the name I gave the runbook in Orchestrator)

In the Tasks Pane, press Create Runbook Automation Activity Template.

Fill in the Name, Description and choose the correct Management Pack (! Remember the MP you created before). The Class should be filled in correctly automatically for you (Runbook Automation Activity). Then press OK, where the template form will be automatically opened so that you can change the needed properties

Fill in the Title, Description, Area and other fields as you wish. Make sure you choose Is Ready for Automation.  If you don’t do this, you can’t use it as an automation afterwards!

On the next tab, you can create the mappings for the variables that you will need to pass to Orchestrator. Don’t worry about the mappings for now. Press OK to create the template

Create Service Request Template

In the SCSM console, go to Library –> Templates

In the Tasks Pane, press Create Template.

Fill in the Name, Description and choose the correct Management Pack. The Class should be filled in with Service Request. Then press OK, where the template form will be automatically opened so that you can change the needed properties

Fill in the Title, Description, Urgency and other fields as you wish.

On the next tab, you can define your activities for this service request. In real-life, you would start with an approval activity but for this demo, we assume that the HR administrator decides anyway so we add immediately the automation activity which we created before this. Press the button.

Select the Runbook Automation Activity that we just created (Add User To Group)

When you are finished, press OK to create the template

That’s it for today.  One more post left and we got our entire offering ready… Stay tuned

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager

The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager (this post)
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

Recap

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series. I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

In the second post we did some pre-work like creating a management pack specific for this solution and a knowledge base article to give some additional “power” to our solution.

The third post handled the workflow that we needed to build in Orchestrator.

This post will handle the preparations in Service Manager.  We are going to create a connector to Orchestrator and synchronize it so that Service Manager “knows” the existing runbooks.

Here we go

As said, we are going to create a connector in Service Manager to connect to the Orchestrator installation.

Go to Administration –> Connectors

In the Task Pane click on create connector

In the wizard that appears: In General, fill in the Name and Description. Also, select Enable this connector.  If you don’t to this (now) you can always do it afterwards.  But if the connector is not enabled, we won’t be able to use him afterwards to gather the information for the runbooks.

In Connection, fill in the server information and add the run as account with access to Orchestrator.

In my case, the server information is: http://srv-scorch01:81/Orchestrator2012/Orchestrator.svc/.  This is the default path to the web service (with srv-scorch01 as the server )

This is how you can build the URL: :/Orchestrator2012/Orchestrator.svc">http://<computer>:<port>/Orchestrator2012/Orchestrator.svc (please note that this is for RC, if you are still using beta, then you can use :/Orchestrator.svc">http://<computer>:<port>/Orchestrator.svc)

In Sync Folder, select the folder that you want to sync. If you choose “\” you will sync all runbooks.  You can select another folder from Orchestrator depending on your needs.

Finally, in Web Console type in the url of the Orchestrator Web Console (http://<computer>:port where 82 is the default port…)

Press OK to finish the wizard.

Now that this is finished, it is time to use this connector and to synchronize the information from Orchestrator with Service Manager

Go to Administration –> Connectors.  Select the connection you just have created.

In the Tasks Pane, press Synchronize Now and then wait until the synchronization is finished.

That’s it…

Note that this connector won’t synchronize itself or on a schedule.  You will need to do the synchronization again when you have changed some workbooks or when you have created new ones and you want to import them. 

That’s it… 2 more posts to go and then we are ready with our solution

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator

The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator (this post)
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

Recap

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series. I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

In the second post we did some pre-work like creating a management pack specific for this solution and a knowledge base article to give some additional “power” to our solution.

In this post, we are going to focus on the workflow we are going to build in Orchestrator.  Let me already tell you that I didn’t bother to get some checks in the workflow.  In production, we would need to do that, but for this series, and to give a demonstration you want to loose as less time as possible

Let’s start

Here you see the overview of the runbook.  Small one isn’t it .  To build this, I need Orchestrator 2012 and the Active Directory Integration pack.  That’s it.

You see four activities in this runbook. I left the names of the activities like they are when you drag them into the designer.  Again, in production you want to change those so that the different activities have a name that makes the workflow or runbook better readable.

The first one is Initialize Data.  This activity will get the workflow started.  It is also the activity that is responsible for getting the variables from service manager.  As we have seen in Part 1 of this series, our end-user needed to fill in 3 fields.  Two of those fields deliver us the data (the user and the group) that we need to do the job.

Let’s have a look at the properties of this activity.

In the Details, I’ve created two variables.  One called GroupName and the Other one called UserName.  They are both of the type String.  That’s it.  Still easy right

The second activity is the get user activity.  Because our end-user will select a display name from the portal (e.g. Mike Resseler) we need to find that name in Active Directory and come back with the Distinguished Name of the user (e.g. CN=MikeResseler, OU=Demo,DC=Infront,DC=Eu).  Only when we have the DN of that user, we will be able to perform the last activity, namely add that user to a group.  So let’s see how this works.

In the properties, all I have selected is my connector to AD.  This is something you need to create before and is normally done after you have imported the AD Integration Pack.  You can select a few Optional Properties here if you want to.  For example, you can choose only to get the DN name (which is what we need…) but because I wanted to play a bit more later on, I choose to return all the properties of the user to the databus.  Again, in a production environment I would do this to get less data on my databus.

Now we need to go to the tab Filter because there is where we are going to create the “Query” to get the properties of the correct user.

And here we add a query:

All this does is search through AD based on the Display Name that equals our variable we got from the portal and that is passed through the “Initialize Data” activity

The next activity is the Get Group activity.  This is comparable with the Get User activity but it has a small difference in the filter

In the filter, we are going to search for the Common Name (CN) of that group.  The reason for that is that in many cases, a group has no display name, unless you really specified it (each time) into AD.  Many companies don’t do that so that’s why I’m searching for the CN name here

Finally, we have our last activity and that is the Add User To Group activity.  This activity will put the user in the group

This activity has two input parameters. The DN name of the user and the DN name of the group.  Since we searched them before on our workflow, we have them on our databus

That’s it.  All you now need to do is find out if your policy works (so test it with the test console our through the web console) and you are done.  Make sure that the policy is checked in and you are one step closer to your solution.

On to the next step which will be the preparation in Service Manager

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work

The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work (this post)
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series.  I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

Today we are going to do the pre-work that is necessary to get our solution up and running.  The good news is that you only have to do this once.  Many of you will probably already have done this before but if not, here’s what I did in the environment.

Step 1: Create a management pack

Because I want to be able to export my work, or delete it when I have messed-up I’m going to create a specific management pack for this job.  In fact, when we started discussing this, we wanted to create one management pack that hold all the information for specific HR offerings.  This is out of the scope for the posts, but know that you can use the management pack for other offerings also, prepare it in a lab and export / import it into your production environment… The way it should

In Service Manager

go to Administration -> Management Packs

In the Tasks Pane choose Create Management Pack

In the Create Management Pack window, fill in the required information and press OK

Here you go, part one is done.  You will see in the next posts and all the work that we will do that I stress out a lot of putting it into the right management pack.  Keep that already in mind, because this is something that is forgotten a lot.

The second step we are going to do, and this is an optional step, is prepare a knowledge base article.

While I say that this is an optional step, I strongly believe that this is an added value to your solution.  Don’t forget you are working with end-users here and providing a knowledge base article for them is very important.  It is maybe not important when you present this to technical people (who reads them anyway…) but you would be surprised how many end-users actually read this before calling the service desk.  And even if they don’t do it, then you can agree with the service desk that they direct the end-user to the KB first.  It will save them a lot of work in the long run.

Before I create the knowledge base article, I’m first going to create a separate folder to store the specific HR articles into it.  This is again optional, but in a real-life environment, this will ease the work of those that need to create, adapt or archive the KB’s.

In service manager, go to Library –> Knowledge

In the tasks pane, click on Create Folder

Fill in the required data, and don’t forget to choose the correct management pack.

Finally, you can create a view inside that folder that targets to a specific category (in my example, I’ve created a KB category called Service Catalog)

Then, go back to Library –> Knowledge

and in the tasks pane, click on Create Knowledge Article

In the Knowledge Article window, fill in a Title, Description, add some keywords (separated by a semi-column), the owner of the article and so on

In the next tab (Analyst) you can enter the “manual” for the job

In the end choose Published to make the knowledge base available for further use (top left)

That’s it for now.  You have done some pre-work and you are ready to start with the next steps.  Important to remember is the management pack that you create once and the added value a knowledge base article will be for your end-users.  Oh yeah, if your KB article isn’t completely nice from the start, don’t worry about it.  You can always revision those afterwards.  The largest companies in the world do it the same way

Cheers,

Mike

Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction

Introduction

A few days ago, I was having a chat with my friend Alexandre Verkinderen (@AlexVerkinderen) about the private cloud.  One of the key points of the private cloud is offerings through a self-service portal.  As usual, because we are all technical people, we immediately started to talk about provisioning Virtual Machines.  However, at a certain moment I wanted to discuss other offerings.  While provisioning virtual machines is a pretty cool thing to demo, I wanted to demo something else that proves the value to business people.  At that moment, we came to HR.  Because both Alex and me believe that many of the requests that HR does to IT can be automated, we thought to start there.  In this series I want to demonstrate (with a very simple example) how easy it is to create such an offering with system center 2012 and how easy it is to convince your management with a simple example.

The example

In every company I worked, I saw a ton of requests at the service desk for adding a user to a group.  How cool would it be to offer that through a self-service portal and then automatically execute it without the need of a service desk or IT-guy and still keep a track record of it.  No 20 emails anymore for asking for approval, no “lost” jobs or delays.  In our example, HR is the decision maker and requests it through the portal and a couple of minutes later, it is done.  We are also building other specific offerings such as create a user, update a users data (such as home address, phone number, title etc.…) but for this series, we will use this specific example.

The series

In this series we will start from nothing besides the base infrastructure.  We do already have a domain controller, a service manager server (with the portal installed) and an orchestrator (and a SQL of course to host our databases).  We also have created the connection in Orchestrator to AD. So our base infrastructure is up and running, and now we need to get started.

This first post is the introduction.  I’ll walk you through the high-level steps.  Explain what we exactly are going to do and what the end result will be.  After that, in the next couple of days, the following posts will follow:

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings

The end-result

Of course you want to know how this is going to look… Well, here goes, this is what the end-user will see (and that is (after all) the most important thing)

This is your Service Portal.  You have a few categories (things we build before and things that are imported through management packs) but we are going to focus on the Human Resources and then Human Resources again part of the portal

When we click on the Human Resources part, we go to the next screen

Here you can see that we have created 1 offering.  This offering is to add a user to a group.  That’s it, nothing more, nothing less, but again, if you ask inside your service desk for a report on how many time gets wasted with these requests…. When we click on that offering (ad user to a group) we get the next screen

Because we want to make it complete, and because we are working with end-users here, we want to make it complete.  This means a KB article as well, and some icons on it as you can see in the screenshot.  Now we click on the Go to Request button and we can start filling in the request

In this request (as we will see throughout the series we want the end-user to give us 3 answers:

• Which user
• Which group
• The Reason

Which user and which group is important to automate this and the reason is to keep a track record of why this user has been added to the specific group.

In the first screenshot, you see that the end-user can pick a user out of a grid and can also use a search to find that specific user.

In this screenshot, you see that the user can select the group from another grid that contains only groups (please note that this is all on the same page and that he needs to scroll)

Finally the end-user types in the reason and then presses the Next button

He can now review the request, and when everything is ok, he can press the Submit button

Done.

Now I know I could extend this demo by adding notifications and stuff but there is some really good information on Technet on that subject already.  So if you want to do that, have a look here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh519719.aspx

Finally, I wanted to have a track record to view in Service Manager

And that’s it.  It is simple, understandable and doesn’t require a lot effort from the HR person.  And more importantly, it is done after a few minutes and IT didn’t do anything

Oh yeah, for those who are wondering… Yes it is perfectly possible to make sure that HR can’t add users to schema admins or domain admins or whatever…

The High-level steps

Now how are we going to build this technically:

First we are going to do some pre-work.  We are going to create a management pack where we will store all our work in.  We are also going to write our knowledge base article already in front.  This is optional, but like I said, it adds an additional “plus” to your solution.  (Not to mention in real-life, less calls to your service desk if the article is well written)

Second, we are going to build an Orchestrator Runbook.

After that we are going to create a connector from Service Manager to Orchestrator and synchronize it to get the runbooks into service manager.

From that runbook that has been imported, we are going to create an automation template.  This is an activity that we can use in change requests and service requests.

Again, we are going to create a template, but this time a service request template and add the automation template in it.   This way, we will have a template with pre-filled in fields that contains the steps that need to be done to get the job done.

Finally, we are going to create a service offering (the HR part in the portal) and a Request offering (add a user to a group) and add that last request offering (or better connect it) to the service offering. 

Still with me?  It will all become clear in the next posts

Stay tuned

Cheers,

Mike

TechDays 2012: 80% of agenda online and 1 more week to benefit from 15% discount

Hey All,

The next blog post comes from Microsoft itself, but if you are a Belgian ITPro or Developer, it’s worth reading… Last week to get a discount for the techdays Belgium and I promise it will be a great edition with content you can’t miss…

For those who are preparing the private cloud… Watch out for the great deep-dive day with nobody less then Dr. Tom Shinder (twitter: @tshinder).  I have the honor and pleasure to present a part of this day with a guy that lives, eats and breaths the Private Cloud…

Cheers,

Mike

Just 1 more week to benefit from a 15% discount on your ticket for TechDays 2012: the Early Bird pricing ends on December 21. Registrations are coming in strong, so be sure to secure your spot before we sell out!

Top Speakers

Developer Track	Alex Turner	Brian Keller	Jeff Prosise
IT Pro Track	Corey Hynes	John Craddock	Adam Hall

We are happy to confirm speakers like:

- In the Developer track: Alex Turner, Brian Keller, Bart De Smet, Gill Cleeren, Jeff Prosise, Maarten Balliauw, Matt Milner, Ben Riga, Steve Sanderson, Nikhil Kothari, Rob Miles, Tarek Madkour, Wade Wegner

- In the IT Pro track: John Craddock, Kurt Roggen, Ilse Van Criekinge, Adam Hall, Corey Hynes, Kim Oppalfens, Mike Resseler, Dan Holme 

International speakers are teamed up with our local experts to give you a top content mix.

TechDays program: 80% of agenda is finalized

This year promises to bring a lot of new content from Microsoft. Looking at the next versions of tooling, languages, OS and management you know this is not a standard TechDays event. Our content is split into current and upcoming technology.

Deep Dives (February 16)

Peter Himschoot and Jurgen Postelmans (U2U) will be delivering a full day .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio (Dev11) Futures for Web Development Deep Dive covering all the latest and greatest in .NET 4.5, focusing on Web Development with ASP.NET, HTML5 and WCF.

Rhonda Layfield will be delivering a full day deep dive covering all the different tools and techniques to deploy Windows 7, she will also cover the upcoming Windows OS deployment tools.

Mike Resseler & Tom Shinder will deliver a full day covering private cloud topics, including Management and Operations of your private cloud infrastructure.

About TechDays 2012

Join our 10^th anniversary edition in a new location (Kinepolis Imagibraine - Braine l'Alleud) and learn about:
• Windows & Internet Explorer
• Windows Server 8 & Hyper-V
• Windows Phone 7 development
• System Center 2012 & Windows Intune
• Tooling and languages with Visual Studio, C# and VB Futures
• Next generation apps
• Cloud development with Windows Azure Platform
• Web development with HTML5, JavaScript and ASP.NET
• ...

> REGISTER NOW

Hope to see you at the TechDays 2012!

Questions? Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or simply via e-mail.

TechNet Forum Assistant released

Microsoft just released a new gadget for your desktop.  This gadget will improve your experience in finding information in the TechNet Forums and Community. 

This tool is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27747 (Oh yeah, there is one for MSDN too )

Some of the features of this gadget are:

• Ask Questions

Through this gadget you can ask questions directly to the TechNet Forum Support Engineers.

• Hot Topics & Resources

The tool directs you to the hottest topics and discussions

• Receive Personal Updates

The gadget gathers forum threads for you on your favorite forums

How to begin

Click on the settings to fill in your favorites and choose your settings

The image above gives you more information on how the tool works

And now the only thing left is… Download it

Enjoy

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Day Event: The Video’s

Hey All,

A couple weeks ago, the Belgian System Center User Group has organized another System Center Day.  And again, it was a fantastic event.  We had some great sessions, nice food and an incredible audience both onsite as on the LiveMeeting.  While we had some technical difficulties (Internet falling out in 2011… Come on ) the overall event was a success and was noted in the evaluation scores.  Thank you very much for all the people who filled this in and thank you to all the people who attended live and offline.  It was a very pleasant day, also for the organizers.

With that said, I’m very happy to say that the slides and video’s are online.

The Keynote

For the first time I had the opportunity of delivering the keynote.  This was a very pleasant experience and a big honor for me.  The keynote I delivered talked about the future of IT and how we can address it as IT people.  Besides Private Cloud, I also addressed consumerization and NWOW (the new world of work)

Inside the presentation was also a link to a youtube video which described the vision of Microsoft in a couple of years.  A must see video if you want to catch the most important message of IT in the next couple of years… It’s all about the APP (and how we are managing it )

Slides can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/mresseler/scug-system-centerdaykeynotemikeresseler-v10

Video can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/system-center-day-2011-keynote

YouTube Video from Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnjmVdY3ry4&feature=related

The Future of Data Protection

The last session of the day, but of course, since we are talking about Data Protection certainly not the least important one .

It is always great to talk about Data Protection and Recovery

Slides can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/mresseler/scug-system-centerdaydpmmikeresseler

Video can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/the-future-of-data-protection

Enjoy, and don’t forget to download the following applications for creating your own private could

Important downloads
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3
System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
Managing Windows Azure Applications

Cheers,

Mike

Call to try out the System Center 2012 stack

For all the System Center fans in the world it is an exciting time… The 2012 stack is coming and every day there is more information about the features, capabilities and so on…

Management is a very hot topic, and the private cloud, hybrid cloud and public cloud aren’t going to change that.  I personally believe the opposite… The more “cloud” we are going to get, the more management we will need.

At that moment, a single pane of glass becomes major important.  And the System Center suite, together with it’s ecosystem of partners can and will deliver that.

Now here’s a call for all of you… You don’t need to believe me, just download, play, work and test them… And you will see that I’m right

Where can I find them?

For all the beta’s of the products: Download here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh505660.aspx

The beta’s you can download are:

• System Center Configuration Manager 2012 beta 2
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC
• System Center Operations Manager 2012 beta
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 beta
• System Center Orchestrator 2012 beta

Ok, but I need more information

You want resources and guides and how-to’s?  Those can be found on our SCUG.BE site and at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh478202.aspx

Cool, but now what?  I’ve got the tools, how do I build my cloud?

If you want to get tips and tricks for this, then make sure that you register for the Virtual Academy and get the free training from the specialists

Join the academy to get free, easy to access training content for IT Pros on cloud computing topics, including a hands-on view at how Microsoft System Center Management tools help manage a private cloud, plus an in depth discussion on how to implement these tools. 

All this information, free for you…

Enjoy

Mike

Book Review: Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010

Introduction

Steve Buchanon’s book Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010, published by Packt Publishing is a dedicated book about Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010. Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager is a Protection and Recovery solution for Microsoft environments.

The Review

There is not much guidance about Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM) out there. You have the TechNet documentation and some good guidance on the blogs of the Data Protection Manager MVP’s and System Center user groups but that’s about it.

Steve starts his book with an overview of Data Protection Manager and continuous throughout the book as he is implementing Data Protection Manager in a business environment. Chapter 2 is a very valuable chapter for the implementer as he poses the right questions that everybody should ask before implementing a backup solution.

The author continues the project by providing full installation guidance and upgrade guidance also when you are running the older version of DPM. He then goes further in doing the Configuration of the product and finally starts protecting different data sources. What I particularly like about this is that he thinks out of the box and provides a great example on how to protect a Microsoft service that is not included in the “out of the box” protection possibilities. With that knowledge and thinking, every administrator should be able to protect any Microsoft service.

Of course he spends quite some time on the Recovery process, a process that is forgotten a lot by many administrators and guides you through this process. Important here is that he clearly indicates that this is also a process you have to plan carefully.

More information is also found on cloud backup, 3^rd party integration, PowerShell documentation (a must read) and troubleshooting the product.

This book is a very valuable add-on to the available documentation and a must have for everybody who wants to investigate the possibilities of Data Protection Manager and for those who need to implement and work with it on a daily basis. This book will provide you with additional ideas, possibilities and information that is needed when you work with DPM as your backup product of choice. What is also interesting is that he likes to use links to additional information from the field instead of using the Microsoft links. This however could be also dangerous for dead links.

If you want to give me a downside of this book, is that the author remains nicely within the borders of DPM which is enough for most of the companies out there. If you however need advanced guidance for specific backup implementations, then you are still on your own. Hopefully the author thinks about this for a follow-up of this book.

Enjoy

cheers,

Mike

Microsoft’s internal use of SCDPM 2010

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released a case study about System Center Data Protection Manager 2010.  The customer in this case study is Microsoft’s own internal IT.  This is a very interesting case study as Microsoft is a very large organizations, with divisions worldwide, many datacenter and lot’s of data to protect (3.5 petabytes!!!!).  But as with any other case study, it is an interesting read but it doesn’t give you any technical details or information on how they did the work.

Another SCDPM MVP and good friend of my Yegor mentioned on his blog last week that Microsoft has released two more documents around the case-study.  I downloaded those and found out that they are actually containing great information for everybody that is tasked with a new setup of SCDPM or a migration from 2007 to 2010.

A must read:

Protecting Server Data with System Center Data Protection Manager 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26659

Managing Data Back Up at Microsoft with Data Protection Manager 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5898

Cheers

Mike

New DPM2010 book available!

For all the DPM 2010 administrators / fans...

There is a new book out there: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Data-Protection-Manager-2010/dp/184968202X

From AMAZON:

practical step-by-step guide to planning deployment, installation, configuration, and troubleshooting of Data Protection Manager 2010

• A step-by-step guide to backing up your business data using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 in this practical book and eBook
• Discover how to back up and restore Microsoft applications that are critical in many of today's businesses
• Understand the various components and features of Data Protection Manager 2010
• Gain valuable insight into using Data Protection Manager through the author's real world experience

In Detail

Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 is a backup and recovery solution that provides continuous data protection of the Windows environment and file servers to seamlessly integrated disk, tape, and cloud storage.

This practical, step-by-step tutorial will show you how to effectively back up your business data using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 and how to plan, deploy, install, configure, and troubleshoot Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 as a standalone product. The book focuses on Microsoft best practices as well as the author's own real-world experience with Data Protection Manager.

The book starts by providing an overview of DPM and the relevant planning that is required for your backup needs, before moving on to installing DPM. Then it dives deep into topics such as DPM Administrator console and Task Areas, configuring DPM to function, configuring DPM backup on servers, backing up critical applications, recovery options, and DPM offsite backup and recovery, amongst others.

A practical guide to using Data Protection Manager 2010 as your backup and recovery solution

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to develop a backup solution strategy
• Install, configure, and administer Data Protection Manager 2010 effectively
• Learn how to back up and perform bare metal recovery of Windows servers using Data Protection Manager
• Discover how to back up and restore critical Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, SQL, Hyper-V, Exchange, and ISA 2006
• Understand what is available for Data Protection Manager Offsite, cloud backup, and recovery options as well as how to configure them
• Master PowerShell to perform tasks with Data Protection Manager
• Troubleshoot common Data Protection Manager Problems
• Configure and use SQL service self-recovery
• Learn how to configure and use client protection in Data Protection Manager
• Protect clients and servers in untrusted domains or in workgroups

Approach

This book is a practical, step-by-step tutorial to planning deployment, installing, configuring, and troubleshooting Data Protection Manager 2010. It will take you through all the steps required to use DPM to effectively back up your business data.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Network Administrator, System Administrator, Backup Administrator, Storage Administrator or IT consultant who wants to effectively back up your business data using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010, then this book is for you.

A good understanding of operating systems and backup devices and network administration is required. However, prior knowledge of Data Protection Manager is not necessary.

About the Author

Protecting a Virtual Machine and also inside a guest

Working on the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager booth the last few days got myself quite some insight in what customers want from DPM.  It also brought up a few “issues” that actually are non-issues but where you need to do a few steps to get the issue out of the way.

This is the scenario.  People want to protect the entire virtual machine once a day, a week, a … depending on their needs.  At the same time, they want to add a DPM agent inside the guest to enjoy the “every 15 minutes backup” for SQL or Exchange or so.

This scenario provides two great things:

1. You have a Disaster Recovery plan

You can recover your entire virtual machine, from x-days old.  Start the box, and then recover the latest data in the guest

2. You have a restore test scenario

Recover the virtual machine to an alternate hyper-v host.  And then do the recovery inside the guest again.

So you get real value for this scenario.  But here’s the catch.  When you are protecting the hyper-v machine, it will also go inside the guest to get a consistent state and truncate logs.  But you have also a guest backup that also will truncate logs… Houston, we have a problem here…

Luckily there is an answer to this problem.

The issue is described in this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975354

Issue 3
The application backup operation in the virtual machine (VM) is incorrectly affected by the VM backup operation on the server that is running Hyper-V.

However, in some cases, this doesn’t solve the problem.  Don’t panic… Here is what you need to do:

You can apply the following registry entry in a virtual machine to fix "Issue 3" for that virtual machine:

Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Virtualization\VssRequestor
Name: BackupType
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 or 1

If this registry entry is created and its value is set to 1 , application backup will not be affected by the virtual machine backup operation on the server that is running Hyper-V. If this registry entry does not exist, or if its value is 0 , the "Issue 3" occurs.

Enjoy

Mike

DPM 2012: The preview

As MMS 2011 is going to the end, today was the most wanted session of the entire summit

The session started with the overview of how DPM has changed over the years, starting with V1, V2 and so on… Now, with DPM 2010 (which is V3) gaining more momentum, the team released what the new stuff will be in V4, or DPM 2012

The nice thing is that they listened to all of us out there, and implemented the most requested features

So what can we expect for the next release:

Centralized Management

• Centralized Monitoring
• Remote administration
• Remote recovery
• Role Based management
• Remote corrective actions
• Scoped Troubleshooting
• Push to Resume Backups
• SLA based Alerting : Alert only when SLA violated
• Consolidated Alerts ensure one ticket per root cause issue
• Alert categorization (Ex: infra alerts versus backup failure alerts)
• Allow admins to automate/extend the base functionality using PowerShell

I can’t show you screenshots of how it looks, because they did a live demo but I can guarantee you that the crowd in the room went wild.  The integration with OpsMgr is very neat and gives you real good tools to work on your DPM server(s) easy, straight to the point and last but not least… FAST.

Role-based management

You asked for it, you get it.  While you still need to be admin on the DPM box to be able to manage it, in the next version there will be different roles available for you to scope your DPM environment to the right people.  While the picture above will probably still be subject of change, I think it is clear that role-based administration is on the way, and that the combination of DPM role-based administration and OpsMgr integration…. Well, I think it speaks for itself

Certificate Base Protection

DPM 2010 already has workgroup support… With DPM 2012, this will be done by certificates, which is much easier to manage in larger environments and from a security point of view will be much more appreciated by the security people.  Oh yeah, and there will be support for workgroup clustering protection.

Tape Media Co-location

In DPM 2012 you will have the possibility to co-locate multiple protection groups on one tape set… Yes, you have read that correctly

SharePoint item-level recovery

In DPM 2010 and with SharePoint 2010 you already had easy Item-Level Recovery.  (It is also possible with SharePoint 2007 but then you need the recovery farm)  It can take a while to recover a single item, but it’s there.  In 2012, they will enhance that experience and recover much faster then before.

Virtual DPM Enhancements

You run DPM virtually?  (Which works well BTW) You can’t do item-level recovery of hyper-v because of this?  It’s coming now!

Generic Data Source Protection

For me, this is one of the most exciting features.  This will open up DPM to every Microsoft workload as long as the product team will adapt this.  And they will need to do that.  As example, we were shown how Virtual Machine Manager has already leveraged this to protect the VMM database.  In the future, they will extend that with the protection of the VMM library so that you can protect VMM the same way as SharePoint.  One-box, one-click, and of you go.

Want more?

Watch out for the future because more exciting things are coming.  Integration with Service Manager.  Powershell integration.

Should I wait to install DPM?

NO!  Start now by implementing DPM 2010 already.  The centralized management will be able to connect to your DPM 2010 boxes.  There is no need to wait because the product is ALREADY great, and with the upgrade track / side-by-side migrations and everything they will provide us with it will be easy to go to DPM 2012 when it is released.

If you have questions or want to know more about DPM, don’t hesitate to contact me through this blog or contact the Microsoft people.

Cheers,

Mike

Getting the non-administrator client recovery working in DPM 2010

As said in a previous post, with the latest QFE, it is now possible to give your end-users the possibility to recover data from the DPM server through the DPM Client UI, without them being local administrator on their machine.

This is a feature that many administrators wanted, and now it is finally there.

So after installing the QFE on my environment, I started to test this out.

Now here is the first catch…

There is a mistake in the documentation of the KB.  It states the following:

The administrator of a client computer has to set the name of non-admin users who have permissions to perform end-user recovery of protected data of a client computer.  To do this, the administrator must add the following registry key and value for each of those non-admin users

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent\ClientProtection and then create a new key called ClientOwner as REG_MULTI_SZ

So first thing is browse to that hive

Second thing was inserting the new registry key

When I couldn’t get it working, I wrote an email to the product team and also digged in to the log files.  There it clearly stood that the key needed to be ClientOwners with an S at the back.

PS: REG_MULTI_SZ = Multi-String Value

I changed that, but it still didn’t work as I expected.  Luckily, the product team replied very fast (thank you Venkat!) and gave me the naming convention to use for placing the non-admin users in that key. (which I had wrong also ofcourse…)

The convention is: DOMAIN\Username

And if you want multiple non-admin users in that registry, then you need to use DOMAIN\Username, DOMAIN\Username2

When that was done, I rebooted the windows computer, waited until a backup was taken and then it worked:

Next post will go deeper into the Client protection

Cheers,

Mike

Update: Thanks to Alex Smits, who saw I had the wrong QFE link...

DPM QFE installation

Our MMS presentation is in two weeks, and I have already started building servers a while ago, but now that the DPM product team has released a QFE I decided to install it on my demo environment.  Many of you will say that this a bad idea considering that MMS is so close and things could go wrong... but my trust in the DPM product team is high so I just went on with the installation :-)

As always, my advice is to read the entire knowledge base very well, to make sure that you understand how to install this.

On of the prerequisites of installing this is KB2223201 when DPM 2010 is installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 or KB2279787 when DPM 2010 is installed on Windows Server 2008.

Because I never installed the KB2223201 on that demo machine, I decided to have a look at what the issues could be...

The installer checks this however, and I don't get the change of installing the update without the hotfix.

Make sure that you have this hotfix in front, because this one requires a reboot, and that is something you don’t want to do in the middle of the day.

Now that I got rid of the hotfix prerequisite, I could start the actual installation

Information about the jobs that will fail and that there will be taken a backup of the DPM database

Accept the license agreement

And that’s it, the installer is installing the update

Press Close to finish the installation.  I left the Open DPM 2010 administrator console checkbox on because I want to deploy the update to my agents asap, so that I could keep them protected

As you can see, every agent requires an update.  By selecting them (or doing it one by one) and clicking on the update available link, you can start the upgrade process

You will get a notification again that running jobs will fail, but then again, they would fail anyhow because you are not running the latest agent version

And finally it is finished.

This was an installation for a single DPM server with the SQL dedicated on the same box.

If you have the SQL remotely installed, don’t forget to run the Sqlprep-KB2465832.msp (the x64 or x32 depending on your situation) BEFORE you start upgrading your agents.

If you have the DPM Management shell installed on a remote computer, then run the DPMManagementshell2007-KB2465832.msp

And if you have custom DPMRA ports then you need to do additional work after the installation (see the KB for information)

The same goes when you have IBM libraries, read the document carefully.

That’s it for today.

Next thing is testing the client protection with a non-admin user

Cheers,

Mike

New QFE available for DPM 2010

The DPM product team has just released a new QFE: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2465832

Things that got resolved:

• When you change the ports that are used by the Data Protection Manager 2010 Remote Access service, recovery jobs may fail.
• On some client computers, the System volume runs out of space when local shadow copies are created and when the shadow copy storage is set to UNBOUNDED.
• When you try to use one Data Protection Manager 2010 server to protect more than 1,000 client computers, you receive a warning that states that you cannot protect more than 1,000 client computers by using Data Protection Manager 2010. You receive this message even though Data Protection Manager 2010 can protect up to 3,000 client computers.
• When you try to use one Data Protection Manager 2010 server to protect more than 1,000 client datasources, you receive a warning that you cannot protect more than 1,000 datasources by using Data Protection Manager 2010. You receive this message even though Data Protection Manager 2010 can protect up to 3,000 client datasources.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 does not support the IBM System Storage TS2900 Tape Autoloader backup, recovery, or detailed inventory operations. The tape is left behind in the drive after any of these operations.
• When you use Data Protection Manager 2010 Replication Agent to protect a 1.2 terabyte SQL server that has lots of .ndf secondary data files, Data Protection Manager 2010 Replication Agent crashes.
• If you are not the administrator on a client computer, you cannot perform an end-user recovery of protected data on the client computer.
• When there are many client computers that trigger client back up or client recovery operations, corresponding jobs are not triggered on the Data Protection Manager 2010 server. When the Data Protection Manager 2010 server enters this state, any later client backup or client recovery operations are not triggered on the Data Protection Manager 2010 server.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 experiences slower performance if you try to protect more than 300 client datasources on a secondary Data Protection Manager 2010 server.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 does not keep a recovery point for a client datasouce that was not synchronized during the retention period.
• If there are many list items within of a SharePoint List in a SharePoint Content Database, the generation of a SharePoint Item level catalog will fail continuously for the SharePoint Content Database.

When I look at the things that got fixed, there is one in particular that drew my attention…

If you are not the administrator on a client computer, you cannot perform an end-user recovery of protected data on the client computer…

That is something huge!  That is actually something we were asking for and while we always thought that they would give it to us in the next version or if we got lucky in a service pack, we already have it now.  Now every company that owns DPM should really look at the client protection!

Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d3fabb18-1adb-4c87-a95d-d3c3826d5bfb&displaylang=en

And as always, make sure that you follow the install guidelines correctly.

Have fun with this great release

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2012

The MVP summit is over, had a great time over here meeting a lot of people, placing faces to people that I’ve worked and chatted with. 

But the most important thing about the MVP summit is the interaction with the product team.

And the guys of the DPM product team did a great job hosting this event for us.  We have discussed many things, and seen some great stuff.

And the cool thing that we learned is that the product team does listen to the customers and the it community.

Those of you who took the time and effort to fill-in the future survey that was available on the connect site can start getting curious.  I’ve seen the results of the survey, and I’ve already seen the response of the product team to that.

You want to know more?  Sorry, can’t tell you more… at least not just yet.

For those of you who go to the MMS summit, I definitely would recommend to go to the following session:

BB18: A first look at DPM 2012: http://www.mms-2011.com/topic/details/BB18

Hope to see you all there… It will be fantastic… You will cheer for it… You will love it… I promise

Cheers,

Mike

EASE

Microsoft Belux is about to launch a new campaign called EASE

EASE stands for:

• Explore the newest technology
• Solve problems with Technical Insight
• Advance your career to the next level
• Engage with your local IT community

The idea behind the campaign is to help us in finding the resources needed to advance in our career.

The landing pages can be found here:

Dutch: De aanbevolen Key Resources van TechNet voor IT Professionals

English: Our Recommended Key Resources from TechNet for IT Professionals

French: Exprimez votre potentiel avec Microsoft TechNet

So if you want to explore information about the newest technology, solve the problems you are encountering, advance your career and engage with the user groups and local it community, then make sure you get to the landing page and retrieve your information.

Enjoy the information, and make sure that you read my story at the bottom of the landing page ;-)

Cheers,

Mike

TechDays 2011: Final Chance to Register with Early Bird Pricing!

Soon it will be Techdays 2011 in Belgium.  Techdays Belgium is the opportunity to see some great sessions from top speakers all over the world, and some local speakers as well.

I’m honored to say that I will be presenting myself, together with Alexandre Verkinderen from the System Center User Group Belgium.

More information about my session will follow, but you can already find the abstract on the Techdays website: www.techdays.be

If you haven’t registered yet, then do it now, because the early bird ends on February 28th.

Hereunder you can find the communication from Microsoft about it…

Time is running out to enjoy a special Early Bird pricing and attend this year’s TechDays. With a fantastic speaker line-up, we are sure this is a not-to-miss event. Early Bird Pricing will end on February 28th, so don’t miss out on this unique opportunity and save up to €125!

TechDays Main Conference on April 26th and 27th

During the main conference on April 26th and 27th, 6 Developer and IT-Pro tracks bring you a mix of new technology and in-depth content on current technology with over 60 sessions planned. Have a look at the session listing and you will discover which sessions have been confirmed so far. You will also notice that we have invited some top notch speakers who are eager to share their expertise.

TechDays Deep Dives on April 28th

On the third day of TechDays, April 28th, we host a Deep Dive day with 4 different tracks for developers and IT-Pros. As a developer you can choose between two tracks that go in-depth and focus on Best Practices.

As an IT Professional you have the option to choose between 2 solutions based tracks:

This is just a glimpse of what you can expect. Take a look at the constantly updated session listing to filter and browse through confirmed speakers and sessions.
Next to learning there is also the networking aspect of this conference. We give you the opportunity to connect with Product Managers from Redmond, meet your peers, talk to our user groups and much more.

Hope to see you at the TechDays!

Cheers,

Mike

Calling the Belgians for MMS 2011

Hey All,

As you might have read or seen in the media the last days, there is a possibility that a volcano will erupt in Iceland soon.  For those who can remember it, a volcano eruption happened which caused some of us to drive to Madrid Airport and go to Vegas from there.

There were also Belgians who didn’t make it and many many Europeans never arrived at MMS last year.

When I read the news,  and twittered about it, the news got picked up quite fast and Rod Trent from MyITForum wrote a post about it.  (See here: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rtrent/archive/2011/02/09/icelandic-volcano-to-set-the-tone-for-mms-2011-mms2011.aspx)

We all hope that this year MMS won’t be disturbed by volcano’s, but if this would happen, we, from the System Center User Group Belgium would like to be prepared and orchestrate possible “alternative” routes.

So if you are a Belgian, and if you are going to MMS 2011, then sent me an email @ Mike(dot)Resseler(add)infrontconsulting(dot)com with your data so we can keep you informed if necessary. (Let’s hope not)

And at the same time, getting the Belgian System Center fans together is a nice plus :-) and we can keep you informed about the cool things that will happen in Vegas.

Cheers,

Mike

Prepping for MMS 2011

As we are now beginning of February, the excitement for the next few months is starting to come.  In a few weeks we will have the MVP summit where I will meet many of my peers, fellow MVP’s and more interesting people and where I will attend great break-out sessions and events.

A few weeks later, I will go the MMS summit where I have the honor of presenting together with David Allen a session on System Center Data Protection Manager.

This is the information about our session:

Title:  BB36 System Center Data Protection Manager 2010: Help, the Datacenter is Down... Let's Restore

Abstract: Monday morning, 8 o’ clock.  You arrive at your desk and find out that the datacenter is down.  There is no DC, Exchange, SharePoint or SQL anymore…

What to do?  Wait, I have DPM 2010, let’s restore everything and become, again, the hero of the day.

Join us in this session where we will demonstrate how easy and fast we can recover from a total disaster with the help of DPM.  In this theatric session, we will use Hyper-V, BMR and workload recovery to get the services back online.

Why you don’t want to miss this one…

This session will present you with a scenario of a total disaster.  David and myself will then play some different roles and show you what you can do with DPM to recover your entire infrastructure.  We will be using slides, video and live demo’s in this one.  If you are using hyper-v or one of the Microsoft workloads, if you want to see how you can protect these workloads, virtual machines and even physical machines.  And if you want to see how we can recover these machines and workloads you need to come over and watch.

Hope to see you all there

Mike

A new add-on for DPM: dBeamer!DPM

It seems that there is a new add-on available for system center data protection manager. 

The add-on is called dBeamer!DPM and according to their website, it transforms DPM into a central component of a High-Availability – On-Demand infrastructure.  This of course drew my attention :-).

So I went further with reading the information

With the add-on, DPM administrators are able to browse data history captured in DPM and perform an instant data recovery from Microsoft DPM at anytime.

Ok, this is getting more interesting ;-).

The add-on allows you to start the recovery process, and instantly allows you to use the data, while the recovery process is still busy.  And even databases that are being recovered can be used instantly while the recovery is still in progress.

With dBeamer!DPM, you can even recover data from the DPM repository without the DPM service is actually running or present…

And with the fact that you can start your services (such as SQL) or your VM’s while the recovery is still in progress, make modifications to the data, it gives IT administrators a RTO of almost nothing.

Now this information comes from the website of instavia, which is the company that made the software.  I haven’t tested it out yet (I’m going to send an email asking for a test as soon as possible :-)) but it certainly seems promising.  If all above is true, then you can have a killer tool together with DPM.

Hopefully I get a test / demo license and I can give you more information soon

Cheers,

Mike

From the Forums: Could not enumerate Exchange

Here's a strange case that has been discussed on the great DPM forums.

A user reported that he could not enumerate the Exchange server when he was creating a protection group for Exchange Server using the DPM wizard.

These are the errors he got:

DPM could not enumerate application component Microsoft Exchange Server\Microsoft Information Store\xxx\17a465cc-90ca-4abd-927f-9aed49f33b5e on protected computer xxx. (ID: 964)
Please make sure that writer is in good state.

DPM could not enumerate application component Microsoft Exchange Server\Microsoft Information Store\xxx\17a465cc-90ca-4abd-927f-9aed49f33b5e\File on protected computer xxx. (ID: 964)
Please make sure that writer is in good state.

DPM could not enumerate application component Microsoft Exchange Server\Microsoft Information Store\xxx\17a465cc-90ca-4abd-927f-9aed49f33b5e\Logs on protected computer xxx. (ID: 964)
Please make sure that writer is in good state.

We let him do all the usual stuff but it didn't solved anything.

Until today, nothing was found to solve this case, and there were many more reporting this issue.  But today, a user named Frans Molenaar found a solution.  Although it sounds like a very strange solution which has nothing to do with the issue, I decided to test it out in my sandbox and come to the conclusion that it actually indeed solved the case.

So here goes:

First: Check on the exchange server if the following powershell scripts exist:

In  %ExchangeInstallPath%\bin you need to find the following scripts:

• CommonConnectFunctions.ps1
• CommonConnectFunctions.strings.psd1
• Connect-ExchangeServer-help.xml
• ConnectFunctions.ps1
• ConnectFunctions.strings.psd1
• RemoteExchange.ps1
• RemoteExchange.strings.psd1

Second: Check the following registry keys if they exist:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns]
@=""

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010]
"CustomPSSnapInType"="Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.AdminPSSnapIn"
"ApplicationBase"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin"
"AssemblyName"="Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.Configuration, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
"Description"="Admin Tasks for the Exchange Server"
"ModuleName"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin\\Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.Configuration.dll"
"PowerShellVersion"="1.0"
"Vendor"="Microsoft Corporation"
"Version"="14.0.0.0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup]
"CustomPSSnapInType"="Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.SetupPSSnapIn"
"ApplicationBase"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin"
"AssemblyName"="Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.Configuration, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
"Description"="Setup Tasks for the Exchange Server"
"ModuleName"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin\\Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.configuration.dll"
"PowerShellVersion"="1.0"
"Vendor"="Microsoft"
"Version"="14.0.0.0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Support]
"CustomPSSnapInType"="Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Support.SupportPSSnapIn"
"ApplicationBase"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin"
"AssemblyName"="Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Support, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
"Description"="Support Tasks for the Exchange Server"
"ModuleName"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V14\\bin\\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Support.dll"
"PowerShellVersion"="1.0"
"Vendor"="Microsoft Corporation"
"Version"="14.0.0.0"

If this is not the case, then copy the registry keys from another exchange server and after that, it works.

To test this, I exported some of the registry keys, removed them and tried the DPM wizard.  I got exactly the error as described in the thread.  After imorting the keys again, everything worked as a charm.

If you have this similar issue, then check these things out

For the complete thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmexchbackup/thread/25ef304c-b9b5-47b6-a65d-17967ab0ad62/

And thank you Frans Molenaar for finding this solution

Cheers,

Mike

Configuring Cluster Networks for CSV redirected access

Here's a great article published by Microsoft:

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Hyper-V protection: Configuring cluster networks for CSV redirected access

Those of you who have ever worked with DPM 2010 and the protection of hyper-v guests, located on a CSV know that this could be a pain in the ...

We have seen many reports on dying clusters, non-performing servers and so on.

The first option is, and always is, make sure that you het the hardware VSS provider (http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2010/02/05/tested-hardware-vss-provider-table.aspx)

But sometimes it is just not possible (there is no VSS provider, or it is not compatible)

Second option would be to serialize the backup of the virtual machines. (Great article by Robert here: http://robertanddpm.blogspot.com/2010/07/enabling-serialized-backup-of-hyper-v.html)

And even further, the article published now gives a great overview on how and why you should have a dedicated network for redirected mode.

Enjoy: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2473194

Cheers,

Mike

A new DPM MVP

I'm verry happy to hear that a good friend and fantastic DPM guy Robert Hedblom has received the MVP award for System Center Data Protection Manager.

Check out his blogpost here: http://robertanddpm.blogspot.com/2011/01/mvp-award.html

Congratulations Robert, you have earned the reward!

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Setup Pre-Requisite Checker Tool download

Microsoft recently has released the DPM 2010 Setup Pre-Requisite Checker tool.

You can find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6bfe19b9-1302-4dbb-a202-c20159d67057

Make sure you read the instructions on that page well...

• The Tool will NOT run if you have a DPM agent or the DPM Management Shell installed on the server.
• The Tool will automatically install VCRedist 2008, enable the Powershell role and install .net 3.5 SP1
• It will ask you if you are going to use the dedicated SQL instance or a remote one
• It will install Doctor Watson (even if it is already installed)
• It will install SIS if not yet installed
• It will check if you have MSI 4.5 (and install if not)
• It will check for KB 975759 and install it if necessary
• And then you have the possibility to launch the SQL Server Configuration Checker.

So as you can read, it will prepare your server for the installation of DPM.  So in my opinion, they should change the name and make it the DPM 2010 Setup Pre-Requisite Installer tool :-)

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Hyper-V Protection: Cluster networks for CSV redirected access

Another great KB is launched...

This is all about that you can "kill" your network by protecting your hyper-v virtual machines on a CSV, by using a software VSS providor.

This has been discussed on the forums for many many times, and now, we finally have a clear, explained reason, and some workarounds and solutions

A must read KB if you want to protect VM's

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2010/12/09/system-center-data-protection-manager-2010-hyper-v-protection-configuring-cluster-networks-for-csv-redirected-access.aspx

or

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2473194

Cheers,

Mike 

DPM and the case of EFS

A question that has come to the forums many times... How does DPM handle files that are encrypted with EFS.

Although most of us kind of knew how it worked at the back, it was never a proven statement.  Now, there is finally a KB that explains it quite well.

When you are protecting files that are encrypted, this is what happens:

DPM 2010 QFE Rollup available

Microsoft has just released a DPM 2010 QFE Rollup.

This, much awaited hotfix rollup, fixes the following issues:

• You cannot protect the Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) on a secondary DPM 2010 server.
• You are prompted to restart a client computer after you install an agent on the client.
• DPM services crash, and you receive the error, "Unable to connect to the database because of a fatal database error."
• MSDPM crashes, and event ID 945 is logged in the event log.
• When you change a Protection Group, add a very large database, change the disk allocation, and then commit the Protection Group, DPM 2010 does not honor the user intent, and instead, DPM 2010 sets the sizes of replica and shadow copy volumes to the default sizes.
• The Management tab does not link to information about the latest Microsoft Knowledge Base article for DPM 2010.
• You receive the message, "Computers not synchronized," when you try to replicate DPM 2010 databases to a System Center Operations Manager. 

The information for the KB can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2250444

The download can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f399fbfa-5c8b-4eb6-bda2-ea997745919a

Enjoy

Mike

TechED Israel 2010

I’m very pleased to announce that I will be presenting on TechED Israel 2010.

My session’s topic: Protecting Microsoft applications efficiently with DPM 2010

Abstract:

System center Data Protection Manager allows you to easily backup and restore Microsoft's Hyper-V, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and more. Learn about the capabilities of the product and the benefits of using it to better deal with your application backups needs.

For all the System Center Data Protection Manager fans out there who come to this event, ping me so we can meet!

Except for the session, I also will be joining the Ask The Experts event.  This will be a cool event with drinks and food and a change to get to us and ask us all of your questions.  If you have questions about SCDPM (or something about the other System Center Products) then join us over there.

See you all there!

Mike

PS: Here you can find my session: http://www.microsoft.com/israel/TechEd2010/Tracks/DTC.aspx

Chalk-Talk 9 December 2010

I will be at the Chalk Talk of 9 December 2010.  This event will host several industry experts from Belgium and will give YOU the opportunity to ask your questions.

If you have any questions about one of the below topics, don’t hesitate to send them or join us live and ask them there.

The topics are:

· Exchange Server

· Active Directory & Identity

· Security

· General networking TCP/IP

· Group policies

· General Windows server technologies

· Virtualisation technology

· MS OS deployment both server and client

· ISA server and UAG

· DPM and backup

· ...

More information?

http://chalktalk9122010.eventbrite.com/

See you all there

Cheers,

Mike

From the forums: End-user Recovery when file server is down

Just read a very interesting topic on the forums (link)

A user reported that when the file server is down, the users in his company were still able to get to their files (read-only) through the DPM server.

So basically, when the file server is down, end-users were still able to contact the last backup data through the DPM server through a share named “protectedServerName_protectedServerShare".

He wondered if this was by design, or a bug.

The answer came quickly.  This is by design.  So if your file server is down, and the uses had access to the end-user recovery on the file server, then he or she will still be able to access the data through the DPM server.

Cheers,

Mike

SCDPM 2010 Management Pack has been released

Good news for all the people who are using DPM 2010 and have a Operations Manager infrastructure…

The SCDPM 2010 Management Pack has been released.  You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=32077d99-618f-43d0-843d-4ba4f8019f84&displaylang=en

On that page, you can find two downloads: The documentation, and the actual Management Pack.

As always, before importing a Management Pack, read the documentation.

The documentation gives you a great overview of the capabilities of the management pack and is a must read if you are going to implement it.  A great addition is that they state which monitors you should enable / disable when you are working in a ticketing environment (meaning that you have a service desk / helpdesk system.)

Also worth reading is the blogpost(s) of Jonathan Almquist:

Data Protection Manager 2010 management pack just released – things you need to know

Data Protection Manager 2010 management pack (service and health models)

Both posts give you a lot of information about the management pack.

Certainly the first post should you read as it provides you with information about the “normal”, “SLA Based” or “Ticketing” mode of the system.  According to Jonathan, it is the first management pack that he sees that is built this way so congratulations DPM team :-)

One minor point though, as also stated by Jonathan… The SLA is 24 hours and hardcoded.  Let’s hope that this will be fixed soon enough.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Day in Belgium

I am always proud to be a member of the SCUG Be team, but once a year, I am very proud to be a member of the team.  This is the time, were we succeed in delivering an entire system center day in Belgium, and we deliver it for free.

And this is not just another day of system center presentations, no, this is a day where we can present 3 product managers, 4 MVP’s and other system center specialists.

This is the day where everybody that wants to know or learn something about System Center should be.

As for all of the DPM fans…

The backup guy himself will be present.  Yep, Jason Buffington will be there to present a great session

Come over and get in touch with the product managers, MVP’s, system center specialists and Microsoft people.

Interested? Find out more on http://systemcenterday.eventbrite.com/

See you then,

Cheers,

Mike

DPM SQL Management Studio: Evaluation has expired

On the forums, we got a notification from a user that he got the following error when trying to open the SQL Management Studio from DPM.

I had asked him to check if it was a licensed version and so it was.  This intrigued me and I decided to check a few things.  On my test environment, I received the exact same notification although DPM and SQL were still running.  Because my test environment was an upgrade from beta to RC to eval, I figured that it had to do something with the upgrade, and the fact that the first instances of SQL were installed with evaluation versions.

So I decided to ask for the help of the MVP’s and very soon (actually from minute one :-)) I received answer from Kenneth Van Surksum, Artem Pronichkin and Denny Cherry with possible solutions.

Apparently, there are two versions of this problem.

1. Only the SQL Management Studio has expired.  This is the problem when you did the upgrade path from the Beta 1 because that was still with SQL 2008 evaluation without SP1, and this was fixed in SP1.  To fix it now, you can follow KB 971268 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971268/en-us)

2. The second issue is that SQL itself has also expired, which strangely leads that DPM continue to work, until the first time that you need to restart the SQL server or restart the server itself (everybody needs to patch right :-)) This is discussed in KB 2020443 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2020443)

So in the end, if you are facing or the Management Studio expiration, or after a restart the the SQL instance doesn’t start, then work with the solutions and it will be fixed

Thanks for the assistance guys

Cheers,

Mike

From the forums: DPM is unable to enumerate Virtual SSP Writer on computer [computer name]. (ID: 3005)

This is an interesting one that I found on the forums.  Normally, when you get this error message, this is the advice that I give:

1. Is the SPWriter service running on the WFE servers?

2. If they are running, use the following to register the writer: (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287616(office.12).aspx)

Or in short: stsadm -o registerwsswriter if you don't want to go trough the article

3. Do a vssadmin list writers to see if there are errors with the vss writers

4. Run the configuresharepoint again with a farm administrator account

5. Try again

But in this case, and in a few other cases, it didn’t seemed to resolve the issue.  So the problem had to be somewhere else.  Since the issue couldn’t be helped with the assistance of the forum guys, a call was opened with Microsoft.

Unfortunately, the DPM guys couldn’t solve it either.  Therefore, the sharepoint guys had to assist, and in this joint venture, they found the solution:

Here is the quote of the administrator with the problem

Basically, the error was related to the inability to enumerate all resources defined in the farm's configuration.  What the actual issue was turned out to be a missing database for one of the search services that was configured.

A similar internal MS bug was found that referenced issues with the Search services.  This led us to look at restarting our Search services on all of the servers in the farm.  Even though all of the search services were "running", one of them would not restart and asked to reprovide the credentials and database names, etc.  Before I submitted the restart, I verified on the SQL Server that the database that was referenced, did not exist !  You may ask, "How was SharePoint stating that the service was running if indeed it was not?"  I'm not sure, but after restarting the particular search service, the database was recreated and the VSS enumeration by DPM worked!

So a possible solution (one that worked for me) is to restart all of your search services and ensure that all 'referenced' databases actually exist.

So in the end, it was not a problem with DPM but with the Sharepoint config.  Since I found this interesting (a sharepoint farm that worked, but had issues after all :-)) I decided to search a bit more for this issue.  It seems that it happens quite a lot after an inplace upgrade of sharepoint.

So if you ever get this error, the first 5 steps don’t work for you, then make sure that you check out if the databases exist

Forum Source: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmsharepointbackup/thread/1c456575-5272-4af8-84b0-4c3729265582/

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Storage Calculator links

Almost missed this one, but the new storage calculator sheets for DPM 2010 are available for download:

Exchange

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/1/851E02E6-4CCA-4846-83C5-3C92C8114899/DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_Exchange_2010.xlsx

Hyper-V

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/1/851E02E6-4CCA-4846-83C5-3C92C8114899/DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_Hyper-V.xlsx

Sharepoint

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/1/851E02E6-4CCA-4846-83C5-3C92C8114899/DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_SharePoint.xlsx

I see many requests for a SQL storage sheet, but you can actually use the sharepoint sheet to calculate SQL storage.  Just not fill in the other data ;-)

Enjoy

Mike

Remote install of DPM 2010 agents

It is a fact… From time to time, DPM won’t install the agent through the GUI.  And yes, most of the time, then you need to install it manually.  In the larger environments, we use different methods for our DPM agent deployments, but in the smaller ones, the infrastructure for doing that just isn’t there. 

Hans De Leenheer, which is a colleague of mine does quite some DPM implementations with smaller companies as part of a larger projects.  As he likes the words “a good admin is a lazy admin” (which is something I share with him :-)) he decided to create a small procedure to install the agents on servers remotely.  Now he doesn’t need to RDP to each server.

The procedure can be found here:

http://hansdeleenheer.blogspot.com/2010/08/remote-install-of-dpm-2010-agents.html

Thanks Hans,

Enjoy

Mike

From the forums: Manual agent installation on a DC or RODC

As promised in previous post, here is already an interesting topic.

Many people seem to be having issues with installing an agent on a domain controller (DC) or on a read-only domain controller (RODC).  Whether it is through the automatic install or the manual install, sometimes it doesn’t work.  This can be due to various reasons, one of them being the DC or RODC secured more properly.

Below you can find a method for deploying an agent on a DC or RODC when you encounter this.  The method comes from Praveen D [MSFT]

1. Create and populate the following security groups on Primary domain controller: (Where $PSNAME is the name of RODC on which you are planning to install agent)
    a. Create DPMRADCOMTRUSTEDMACHINES$PSNAME  and add DPM server as a member
    b. Create DPMRADMTRUSTEDMACHINES$PSNAME and add DPM server as a member
    c. Add DPM server as a member of Builtin\Distributed com users group
2. Ensure that above changes are replicated on to RODC
3. Install agent on RODC
4. Grant launch and activate permissions for DPM server on DPM RA service by doing the following:
    a. Run "dcomcnfg"
    b. Expand Component Services ->  Expand Computers -> Expand My Computer -> Expand DCOM Config
    c. Right click DPM RA Service and select Properties
    d. Under 'General', "Authentication Level - Default"
    e. Under 'Location', only "Run application on this computer" should be checked
    f. Under Security, verify that the "Launch and Activation Permissions" (select > "Edit") include the machine account for the DPM Server and Allow
    j. Click OK
5. Copy setagentcfg.exe, traceprovider.dll and LKRhDPM.dll from "c:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\setup" on DPM server and place them in "c:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\setup" on RODC.
6. Run "setagentcfg.exe a DPMRA domain\DPMserver"  on RODC using an elevated command prompt. (Run setagentcfg.exe from the location above i.e c:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\setup)
7. If  a firewall is enabled on RODC run the following commands:
    a. netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="@FirewallAPI.dll,-29502" new enable=yes
    b. netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="@FirewallAPI.dll,-34251" new enable=yes
    c. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=dpmra dir=in program="%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin\DPMRA.exe" profile=Any action=allow
    d. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=DPMRA_DCOM_135 dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=135 profile=Any
8. Attach agent on DPM server, now you are ready to protect the RODC.

Cheers,

Mike

DPM forums: A great resource

Last few months I’m spending quite some time on the Data Protection Manager forums. There are a few reasons why I like to spend some time over there.

1. I like to assist people who have issues with their DPM environments.  Why? I have no idea but I just like it.  Maybe it is because I also get a lot of help from these forums for other products but it is just something I like.  That, and probably the point system that brings out the competitor in me :-)
2. Learning.  I like to read posts made by others and the possible resolutions that are posted.  When I have no clue about what can be the problem but the answer is still resolved, it can help me in the future when I should encounter the same problem.  It will also allow me to help others when they encounter that problem now that I have a solution
3. Approaches.  Many users are posting questions about possible configurations they would like in their environment.  Although many can be seen as “Why would you want to do that”, there are many others where I say “Hey, that’s a great idea”.  And even those where I doubt, it still reminds me that every environment is unique and that business requirements sometimes can be hard to meet.

Now what about the support you get there.  No, it is not always the best support you can imagine.  Don’t forget that on these forums the helping people are volunteers and some Microsoft people.  Also don’t forget that it is pretty hard to troubleshoot issues when you don’t have the entire information, network architecture, log files and so on with you.  I remember a post that took on for days of troubleshooting while the actual issue was so stupid, that another pair of eyes on that server would have solved the issue within minutes.  But still, the answer came after a while.  If you however expect a resolution, and you need it fast, then you better contact your partner or place a Microsoft support call.

Who is who on these forums? And who is giving the responses.

Well, that could be about everybody who has a live-id (and who doesn’t).  Firstly, you have a few MSFT people who moderate the forums and who help.  People such as Praveen D [MSFT] and Mike J are really helpful over there and are doing a great job.  I assume that this is something additional they do in their work and that it is not their main work so considering that, nice job.

Secondly, you have the “other” people.  People like myself who are not Microsoft employees and who like to help others.  For DPM, I’m thinking about Robert Hedblom, Alex Smits and Taylorbox.  But I’m sure I’m forgetting a few others and the list of helping people has grown a lot lately, something I really like. (My apologies for those who I have forgotten)

Besides the Microsoft moderated forums, there are also others who like to share a forum themselves with the community.  One of these guys is David Allen who hosts a forum on SCDPMOnline.org and does a great job over there in answering people’s issues.  (And don’t forget the fact that he has one of the best DPM blogs)

So if you are having problems, make sure to stop by the DPM forums (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/dpm) or by SCDPMOnline.org 

From time to time, I will be using the information found in the forums to write a post, such as the next one.  Why? Basically because it is good information and I can find it myself again :-) and it might be easier for others to find a solution on blogs then on forums.

One final remark.

Users who ask a question on the forum, should always give feedback when they got a response.  Now many questions remain “open” because they have never received feedback from the person with the problem.  This helps others that have this issue.  When they find the forum post, and see that it resolved the issue with the user that had it, they will be more certain to try the resolution in their environments.

It doesn’t take much time to answer, and you can always be notified when somebody responds.

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Documentation

A little bit unnoticed, but found it today, is the fact that there are 4 new documents for System Center Data Protection Manager 2010.

The documents can be found here:

Planning a DPM 2010 Deployment

Deploying System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

Data Protection Manager 2010 Operations Guide

Data Protection Manager 2010 Troubleshooting Guide

Enjoy

Cheers,

Mike

Another fine new blog?

Hey All,

Just discovered (by accident) a new blog about DPM.  The name of the blog is DPMCallBack and can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpmcallback/

The first post is already a good one so I’m hoping for more :-)

The post describes the questions that you will get when you have issues with your DPM installation.  Whenever you want to open a case for DPM, it is good to have these questions answered in advance, it will save you some time ;-)

Here is a copy of the questions:

• Is this a fresh installation of DPM using the RTM bits or was this an upgrade from a previous version or from Beta?

• When did the problem first start? You can select the Monitoring tab and review the Alerts/Jobs for details.

• Has it ever worked as expected?

• What changes (if any) were made just prior to the failures?

• Can you reproduce the problem? If so can you please provide the exact steps?

• Are other protected data sources experiencing the same problem?

• Is the error specific to one type of data source? Example, Exchange jobs fail but SQL and SharePoint are successful.

• What is the application version that is experiencing the problem? Example, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, Exchange 2007…etc.

• Is the protected data source running on a standalone server, domain controller or a cluster?

• Is the system that is experiencing the problem in the same domain as the DPM server?

• Do other protected data sources reside on the same machine? Are they also failing?

• Is the target machine for which you're experiencing the issue on the same LAN as the DPM server or over a WAN?

• What is the error message and ID in the Details pane? If possible, please copy/paste this or provide a screenshot.

Cheers

Mike

Interesting news…

Hey All,

Just had my first week of vacation for this summer (I actually went cooking with a scouts group together with my wife and kids so it was also a bit working ;-)) and when I came back, my inbox, tweets and other stuff had some real interesting information.  An overview:

System Center Data Protection Manager

Six! new posts on the Data Protection Manager technet blog:

• Take Caution when reintroducing old storage pool disk space
• Tested Hardware VSS Provider table
• Why is recovery point consumption smaller than transferred data?
• Replacing Tape Drive Assignments
• The search for DPM Tape Utilities stops here…
• Erasing unsupported tapes & utility automation sample

Jason has also posted an update about his book, Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers.

You can find more information and the first chapter on http://dataprotectionbible.com/ and the post on http://blogs.technet.com/b/jbuff/archive/2010/07/05/it-s-almost-here.aspx

David Allen from SCDPMOnline has posted a great article about Centralised DPM Availability Reporting.  Check it out here

System Center Essentials

The Essentials 2010 resource kit is launched.  Find more information here and here

Dell has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver a solution around SCE 2010.  Information can be found here and here

That’s it for now, still a lot of catching up to do for OpsMgr, Virtual Machine Manager and ConfigMgr, but at least I already read the SCE and DPM information :-)

Enjoy the holidays

cheers,

Mike

MVP Award

Hey All,

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that I have received the MVP Award for System Center Data Protection Manager.

As it goes with an award, it is custom to thank some people, and in my case they really have earned it.

Let’s start with my employer Ferranti Computer Systems and my colleagues (with special thanks to Arne Peleman, Mark Van Giel, Frederik Baert and Valérie Siroux) who allowed me to give presentations and spent some time on the System Center User Group.  Also the continuous remarks on my blog posts and presentations are a real help to improve.

Also the members of the System Center User Group Belgium earn a big thank you.  They gave me a place to blog and the possibility to give presentations.  They also helped me on various ways within the user community when I lost directions :-). (And I probably will loose directions again with this MVP thing… :-)) Thanks Alexandre Verkinderen, Kenny Buntinx, Kim Oppalfens, Kurt Van Hoecke and Yves Janssens. Let’s continue to make the System Center community a fun place to be :-)

I can’t forget some people from Microsoft.  Thank you Jason Buffington and Arlindo Alves for your feedback and support.  It is a real pleasure working with you both in the community.

To all the readers, people who come to our presentations and commenter's.  Thank you, it is always a pleasure learning to know you and seeing you on events, whether offline or online.

Last but not least, there is a special and BIG thanks to my wife and children, who keep accepting the fact that Daddy is playing on his laptop again.  Without their patience and support, I probably would have stopped a long time ago.

Thanks all

Cheers,

Mike Resseler

Twitter: @MikeResseler

Presentation: How To Manage your Sharepoint Environment With System Center

Hey all, yesterday I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on the Belgium Community Day (www.communityday.be).  This event, organized by some members of the Belgian Community is getting more popular every year.  It was the fourth edition and received a speaking slot for the first time here.

It is amazing that just a few people of the community succeed in organizing such an event (almost 500 people registered) and find the necessary sponsors, funding and helping hands to do this event, which was still free for everybody, as it is always been.

The big man behind the event is Gill Cleeren (www.snowball.be) and his team did a fantastic job at Utopolis in Mechelen, Belgium

So, for my session.  The title was How to Manage your Sharepoint Environment With System Center and for the first time in my life I had to present in a cinema room.

I presume this should have made me nervous but instead I actually was quite excited

Here’s a picture from before the session when the audience wasn’t arrived yet.  Still hope that there are pictures when I am actually doing the presentation so if anybody has one… let me know :-)

Although the majority of the attending people were developers, there was quite some people in the room considering that I am giving an IT pro session.  So I was quite happy to start.

In the end, I was quite happy with my presentation except for one moment were my wireless connection to my demo environment dropped.  Small ackward moment but for the rest everything went ok.

Unfortunately I only got one hour and in that presentation I had to discuss how to manage your environment (SCOM) and protect it (SCDPM).

Here are the highlights:

One of the first items I addressed was the growing pains of SharePoint.  Because of the nature of SharePoint, it can be a pain in the **** for IT Pro administrators.

Through the years, SharePoint became more and more popular, which gave additional challenges to administrators.

• Mission Critical information is kept on SharePoint
• More utilization meant that the performance become worse, and because of the above situation, users started to complain because their data was on there
• Companies (read Management) started to ask about redundancy plans for this application
• The capabilities of SharePoint gave the possibility that different regions, different business units had different functions, but this also created headaches for admins
• Everybody knows by know that custom development is the key to success, but how are we going to keep track of this?  Because of the great platform, developers loved it, creating additional applications and workflows.
• SharePoint became quite quickly the new datacenter application, so it needed to be managed as an datacenter application
• Another issue is the fact that SharePoint is everywhere.  It is distributed by nature.  Additional project sites, sites, document libraries and so on are created with ease.
• This also created additional load and admins needed to provide quickly additional resources which wasn’t always that easy.
• Luckily there was virtualization, but that also give another problem, the so-called server sprawl

My next slide was about what benefits can give you when you use it to manage SharePoint

• With SCOM you can easily do proactive monitoring and reporting.  It even integrates with SharePoint’s native monitoring capabilities.
• With SCVMM you can manage the capacity and provide additional SharePoint resources as needed (and then I didn’t talk about Opalis who can automate this workflow based on SCOM’s performance data.)
• SCDPM can help you with rapid and reliable data backup and recovery
• SCOM will also validate your SharePoint environment through the use of prepackaged validated best practices.  Hey, and if your environment has a good reason for not being setup according to the best practices, then you adapt the monitors to your own best practices
• Everybody who ever managed a SharePoint environment knows that patching it is a terrible work.  By using SCCM you can automate parts of the entire process.
• With the new ServiceManager, you can describe your entire farm as a business service (most of it is automated if you are also using SCOM) and get the entire incident and change management process to the application, according to your ITIL or MOF workflows
• Through SCOM you can manage not only SharePoint, but also the OS, the hardware and even the network if you want, giving you an overview of the health of the entire datacenter for this application.
• And last but not least, a consistent user interface through the complete suite makes it easy for your IT admins to administer them all.

This was more a general slide, and then I started to talk about one of the two actual topics.  First one: The SCOM Management Pack for Sharepoint.

The first slide on this topic discussed the improvements over the previous management pack.

• The architecture had changed so now it looked on a server level but also on logical components
• The new SPHA (SharePoint Health Analyzer) rules that are embedded in SharePoint are integrated in the new Management Pack
• There are only two management packs left, the SharePoint foundation and SharePoint Server management pack

Also the differences in rules, monitors etc were shown

And then it was time to just demo the Management Pack.  It is pretty difficult to explain this Management Pack, you just have to see it for yourself to see the value.  This was also the moment I lost my wireless and freezed my remote desktop.  Luckily it returned shortly afterwards so I could continue the demonstration.

Finally, to close this topic, I explained the pitfalls when installing this Management Pack

• Make sure you have all the hotfixes necessary.  They are all described in the manuals that come with the management packs.  Another great example of Read The Fine Manual.
• Make sure that you also install the additional management packs such as the SQL management pack, the IIS management pack and ofcourse the OS management pack.  And if you have a management pack for your hardware and/or network, use them too.
• When you install the Management Pack on an x64 system, there is a little problem that it installs them in the “%Program Files (x86)\System Center Management Packs” directory while it needs to be in the “%Program Files\System Center Management Packs” directory.  Copy the files to there
• Don’t forget to create the Run As Account, this account needs to be Farm Administrator and have the correct rights on the SQL databases.
• Resize your event logs (the windows application log and sharepoint foundation\operational log) to at least 10 MB.
• Disable event log replication when your environment is running on windows clusters.  Otherwise you will get alerts two times.
• And last but not least, but this is a best practice for every SCOM administrator, use an override management pack for your overrides.  This is created by default when you run the config task.

Second part was protecting SharePoint.  And here I wanted to discuss DPM of course, but I also discussed the built-in tools from SharePoint.  The reason for that is quite simple.  Yes you need a backup, yes you need to be able to recover but when a user deletes one document and calls the helpdesk, you don’t want to start recovering that one document because you will have a lot of work.  Yes DPM can do that but you will use this when the user wants the document back but realized it way too late.

Anyway, here are the important takeaways when you are planning a SharePoint project and are thinking about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (which you should always do in the planning phase but hey, it doesn’t always go as it should right…)

• Understand what you need to protect.  Get an overview of the install base (use SCOM for this), understand for what it will be used. 
• Get clear goals with your management.  I can’t afford to loose a document and it must be online all the time is only achievable if they want to spent a lot of money.  If they don’t want that, then ask how much they want to loose, and how long it can take to bring everything up again.  Based on that, decide what you need, get pricing and talk again to your management.
• Read about SharePoint, know what is already included with the product.  Use it in your advantage.
• Make sure that when the product is online, that Business Continuity management in an ongoing process.

Another slide is showed is what is already inside the box.

Oke, the first point was merely explain what the difference is between Warm high availability and Cold availability.

But the other points are extremely useful.

• Recycle bin.  Use it, train your users, and set it on a few days so that you have less work when a user deletes a document by accident.
• Use versioning, force it.  This way, users can’t take an old version and overwrite the newer one.  They can return whenever they want.
• There is the Read-Only Database option.  This is nice.  Take a content database with important information that doesn’t need to be changed again, make it read-only in SQL and SharePoint see this and handless to it.
• If you have custom development, let your developers package all solutions.  If it is a real disaster, then you can reinstall that package easily.
• And finally, there is the possibility of an Unattached Content Database.  You can take a snapshot in SQL or recover one through DPM and read it through SharePoint without the need of being attached to SharePoint.

After that, some slides on how DPM works, but since I already addressed this topic I’m not going to repeat myself.

After a demo of a document recovery, I finalized the session with the takeaways which are all described here.

After the session, I still got a lot of people coming up and ask me a lot of questions on DPM.  Glad to hear that it finally is getting the buzz it needs in Belgium :-)

One last thing that I forgot to mention yesterday (shame on me) but I will mention it here:

All the things that I showed yesterday and described here can also be achieved with System Center Essentials 2010.  Certainly now that Microsoft has released System Center Essentials Plus which gives you licensing for SCE and DPM.

Till next

Cheers,

Mike Resseler

PS: For those who are interested, my presentation can be found at this address: http://www.communityday.be/cd/tabid/130/Default.aspx

Session 1, room 9

Cool new post: DPM licensing explained

Hey All,

Great post from Jason Buffington: DPM Licensing explained, make sure to check it out!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jbuff/archive/2010/06/23/dpm-2010-licensing-info.aspx

Cheers,

Mike

New DPM 2010 datasheets released

Hey All,

From the All Backup Up blog:

5 new datasheets are released about DPM 2010

Product Overview of DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft SQL Server with DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft Exchange with DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft SharePoint with DPM 2010

How to Protect Windows Clients with DPM 2010

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Mike Resseler