System Center Data Protection Manager

Sharepoint 2010 protection in DPM 2010: Part 1

2010-03-11T16:42:50Z

Hey All,

This post will the first of three about sharepoint protection.

Part 1 will be about the preparation to protect a sharepoint farm and some background information what DPM can do with your sharepoint farm.

Part 2 will be about creating a protection group for the sharepoint farm and some explanation on how it works

Part 3 will be an example of how you can do level-item restore and what is necessary to achieve this.

Background information

So what can we protect with DPM 2010? Here’s the list

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010
Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010
Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0
Windows SharePoint Services version 2.0

So what can we do? We can do a farm protection with one-click, there is the possibility of automatically protecting new content databases. We can do a recovery of an entire farm, an entier Database, a Site Collection, a Site and an Item.

Please note that this Site and Item level recovery only works with Sharepoint 2010 without a recovery farm.

Oke, sound all good, time to prepare my environment for Sharepoint protection.

Preparing the Sharepoint environment

First is first, in my labo environment, I only had one server running everything from sharepoint, the front-end IIS, the Sharepoint 2010 application and the SQL server. It ran on a windows server 2008 R2 and was the latest beta available on the connect site.

I started with deploying an agent to the sharepoint server. After that is done, you need to configure something extra on the sharepoint box. So here goes:

Open a command prompt as administrator and go to the DPM agent installation bin folder(default: %programfiles%\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin)

Run the command ConfigureSharepoint.exe –enableSharepointProtection

This will enable the protection of the sharepoint farm. It will enable the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object and the WSS VSS writer. As you can see in the screenshot, it will ask you for a username and password. This needs to be the (or a) farm administrator account.

After that, we are going to run another command: ConfigureSharepoint.exe EnableSPSearchProtection

This will enable the protection of the Search provider. Again, you need to enter the username and password for a sharepoint administrator.

Oke, now let’s have a better look at the command.

Syntax:
ConfigureSharePoint.exe [-EnableSharePointProtection] | [-EnableSPSearchProtection] | [-ResolveAllSqlAliases] | [-SetTempPath <Path>]

Requirement:
This command should be run as a local administrator. For Windows 2008 onwards, ensure that this command is run from an elevated command prompt.

Parameters:
-EnableSharePointProtection
Enables the protection of SharePoint farm. It registers the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object and enables the WSS VSS writer. When prompted to enter user name and password, enter the credentials of the SharePoint farm administrator.

-EnableSPSearchProtection
Enables the protection of WSS 3.0 Search and MOSS 2007 SSP. It registers the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object. When prompted to enter user name and password, enter the credentials of the SharePoint farm administrator.

-ResolveAllSqlAliases
This option can be run only after running -EnableSharePointProtection or -EnableSPSearchProtection on the server. It provides information about all the SQL aliases reported by the WSS VSS writer and resolves them to the corresponding SQL Server instance names. If a SharePoint database is mirrored and configured with SQL alias then the corresponding mirror's SQL Server instance name is displayed as well. This option also reports all the SQL aliases that cannot be resolved to any SQL Server.

-SetTempPath <Path>
Sets the environment variable TEMP and TMP to the specified path

The good observer ;-) has seen that you can run the parameters all at once so that you don’t need to give the username and password twice.

One important note… The farm administrator account doesn’t need to be local administrator on the Web Front End. This was a requirement for DPM 2007. From the moment you do perform the command, DPM 2010 will give the following permissions to the sharepoint farm administrator:

Read and Execute to all DPM directories.
Read, Execute and Write (all) access on Temp directory in the DPM directory.
Read permissions to the DPM hive in the registry.

That’s it for now, next post will be the creation of a protection group

Cheers,

Mike

How to manually install an agent and attach it to the DPM server

2010-03-10T18:54:11Z

Hey All,

I’m receiving sometimes the question about manual installation of DPM agents. Sometimes this is because off using deployment tools, other times it is because of firewall restrictions on the server.

The DPM agent installer from the console works great but when it needs to be done manual, it just needs to be done manual.

So for this, here is a small example on how to achieve this.

In this example, I will install the agent manually on the server, but it is perfectly possible to do this with SCCM or SCE or MDT.

First we need to find the agent installer sources

Depending on which version you need, choose it. In this case it was a 64-bit server.

When the agent installation is complete, we need to run following command

The command is: SetDpmServer.exe –dpmServerName <name server>

Note that when the DPM server is in another domain, use the FQDN

As you can see, the DPM command is now configuring a few items

After that, you need to go to the console and choose to install agents

But instead of choosing the option Install Agents you need to choose Attach Agents and then depending on your situation: Computers on Active Directory Domain or Computers in Workgroup or Untrusted Domain

In my case, it is Computers on Active Directory Domain

In this window you need to choose your servers. This can be one server but multiple at the same time is also possible.

Give the correct credentials

A review, press Attach to start the task

And quickly after, you will get the notification that it is a success.

That’s it.

But what if you want to do the command part on the server to be protected automatically?

This can be achieved by using parameters in your installation package for SCCM, MDT or SCE

USAGE:
DpmAgentInstaller.exe [/q] [<DPM server name>]

[<DPM server name>]
The name of the DPM server to be used for protecting this computer. Specify this parameter if the DPM server is known. If you are installing the DPM protection agent as a part of an image, skip this parameter. You can set the DPM server later using the SetDpmServer.exe tool.
[/q]
Performs a silent install.

So using the following command in your package should solve your problem here: DpmAgentInstaller.exe /q <DPMServerName>

So is this something you would want to use or not? In my opinion, every windows server that you deploy should receive an agent. Why? Because you never know when you need to backup that server. With DPM it is very easy to set the agent for a server as disabled. It won’t use any license so that won’t cause a problem.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers,

Mike

DPM Upgrade Advisor

2010-02-26T09:30:41Z

Hey All,

Microsoft just released an excel document called the SCDPM Upgrade Advisor

http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/26/upgrade-advisor-for-dpm-2010-now-available.aspx

This document will give you guidelines in how to upgrade SCDPM 2007 installations to DPM 2010 installations, even if your DPM 2007 is running on 32-bit OS.

Looks great and with a lot of options to choose, even when you have a secondary DPM server you can choose this option.

Cheers,

Mike

Client-protection: create a protection group and initial synchronization

2010-02-22T15:17:31Z

Hey All,

Last post, I’ve installed remotely a client agent to a workstation in another domain and over VPN. Now it is time to create a protection group with a policy and do the first synchronization. Again I want to see how it will react when I do this when the workstation is under a heavy load. I figured that I might need to do this when a user is working at home or in a hotel and so I need to know if the synchronization will work.

During the first synchronization, I worked on the laptop and I was doing the following tasks:

* VPN open

* Outlook open

* MSN and Office Messenger Open

* Tweetdeck open

* Listening at an internet radio

* Downloading large files from the Microsoft Connect site

* Many programs open and about 30 internet pages open

But first is first, let’s create a protection group

On the second screen, I choose for Clients instead of servers

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On the next screen, I can select my clients. The good part here is that if you select clients that don’t have an agent yet, you can install them now, and those who have an agent but aren’t connected yet to the DPM server will be attached. In my case, the client already has an agent and is attached, so I just select my client. Because I installed the agent, it is now visible in the list, although it is in another domain.

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Here it becomes very interesting. I can start on this screen by creating inclusions and exclusions for my clients.

Here you can see that I have included My Documents but excluded music and temporary internet files

You can add your own directories to it but you already receive a nice list of possibilities

Also, on that screen is an option where you can allow your users to add directories themselves that need to be protected. But if you have excluded a folder and they still want to protect it, they will get a notification that it is not possible (see later in this post)

And you also have the possibility to exclude certain file types

I have to choose for Short term protection since I don’t have a tape drive in my test environment

Now this will be one were a lot of discussion will be. How many times a day do you want to synchronize, what will be the retention range, how long before a disconnected client needs to start alerting?

For the tests I kept it at a minimum but these settings will need to be thought through very good in a real-life situation.

This is the alerting option, as said, it will need some serious thinking what the setting will be here. Is 14 days (the default) enough? When you are away for 2 weeks on holiday, then the 14 days is not enough because you are then away from the office for about 18 days (first and last weekend included), so every company will need to think this through.

Now I need to chose my storage. For this test I will not co-locate my data because I don’t have enough disk space for this in my test environment. What I have read about it is that you choose co-location from the moment you have 10 clients. If you are below, you better split-up so that you don’t lose too much storage.

I also let the Automatically grow the volume option on. This is a very handy new feature and many DPM administrators that are now using DPM 2007 will be very happy with it. Of course this is a risk as your volumes can keep growing until you are out of disk space, but a good backup admin (I actually prefer Protection and DR admin for this product :-) will check the reports on a regular base so that should not cause any problems.

The summary, which includes the link to Optimize Performance which I will probably discussing later on

And finally the success.

So I finally started the synchronization and waited, waited, waited for a very long time.

Some other screenshots:

Trying to add the music folder to the protected items

DPM Synchronizing

Final Conclusion and lessons learnt

The process seems to be working great. Although I took it through a heavy test-drive everything worked flawlessly.

The only minor point was the initial synchronization. It took about half an hour to synchronize 170 MB. But then again, I was pushing the limits. But I needed to know how DPM would react because you might need to do this once, and 170 MB of changes will occur on client workstation.

Cheers,

Mike

Getting the Client-protection working

2010-02-22T08:43:13Z

Hey All,

One of the exiting features of DPM 2010 is the improved client protection of workstations. In this post, I’ll give some more information about it. To make it a bit tricky, I decided to try to install the agent on a workstation
(windows 7, 32-bit) that resides

a. In a different domain (but a fully trusted domain)

b. Is not in the office but connected through a VPN, sitting at home

Since I assume that client protection will be getting more and more attention from companies, I decided to test it out thoroughly. Both for the installation and the first synchronization I decided not to follow the guidelines but really try to do the worst scenario.

1. The installation

Installing the client is the same as installing a server. Manuals from the beta (before the RC) mentioned that I should install it manually (or through solutions such as SCCM or SCE) but I thought that it also would be possible to do this through the UI.

I start by taking the "install agent” option since I didn’t installed it yet. Note also the attach agents that can be used when an agent is installed manually.

Now I need to select the workstation. He will only list the workstations and servers from the domain that the DPM server resides in, so to connect to my workstation on another domain, I had to type in the FQDN name in the box

Here I can give in the credentials for a user that has administrative rights on the workstation in that domain

I decided here not to restart the workstation automatically, instead, I wanted to test if it really is necessary to restart which could be a killer in very large environments.

Finally, the summary and ready to install. Now one little note drew my attention: The computer may momentarily lose network connectivity during installation.

Since the workstation is on a client vpn, this could be tricky :-)

Also, before you can actually do this, you need to make sure that your firewall is configured correctly. I failed the first time because my firewall was wrong configured.

And then the screen of success came. Now I didn’t see the client lose network connectivity, and if it did, then it had to be very short because my VPN tunnel didn’t drop so that seems to be working.

Now let’s look a bit at the changes on the client.

First, I found two new services

Second, here’s how the Client UI looks:

This client already has a policy, but how that works I will explain in next post.

Lessons learnt:

* It is possible to install the agent on a workstation through the GUI from DPM itself.

* You can do it over a VPN connection

* Windows 7 doesn’t need to reboot afterwards

* The DPM client UI will demonstrate a small icon in the notification area after the reboot, but you can start it by starting manually the DPM UI without rebooting

* In windows 7, when you want to see this icon, you need to change the notification settings

And this is the icon, and more information when you right-click on it

Last picture is from a client that is disconnect from the server

Allright, next post: Create a protection group and do the first synchronization, over the VPN of course :-)

Cheers,

Mike

Hotfix: Dynamic Disk Hotfix

2010-02-18T14:40:38Z

Hey All,

Microsoft released a hotfix for potential problems with Windows Server 2008 systems.

Could be an important one if you are experiencing issues with dynamic disks, which is what DPM uses.

Hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962975

Information: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/18/dynamic-disk-hotfix.aspx

Cheers,

Mike

SCUG invites you to “What's new in DPM 2010” (Mar 03, 2010)

2010-02-11T09:08:59Z

What's new in DPM 2010

Microsoft released the public beta for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010. Attend this webcast to learn about Data Protection Manager 2010 and the product features that are causing excitement in the IT community! We will walk you through most of the new features in DPM 2010 and the enhancements that were made to the Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) solution, which is protecting Windows-based application servers and file servers today.

Speaker: Mike Resseler

I'm an Implementation Consultant working for Ferranti Computer Systems NV. I am happily married and have two lovely daughters. I like all the system center products because I believe they can be an added value for managing an infrastructure.

My Blog http://scug.be/blogs/mike/

Agenda Wednesday, March 3, 2010

18:00 Registration and lunch
18:45 Welcome
19:00 What's new in DPM 2010
21:00 Q&A and drink

More info can be found on http://scug.be/content/Events.aspx

DPM 2010 RC: After the Upgrade

2010-02-11T08:26:30Z

Hey All,

Just to let you know…

Since I did an upgrade yesterday from the beta to RC, I now have two instances of SQL

MSDPMV3BETA1EVAL and MSDPM2010RCEVAL

After searching through the newsgroups, it got confirmed that you can throw away the BETA instance

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010: Upgrade from beta to RC

2010-02-10T15:43:24Z

Hey All,

Download of the DPM 2010 RC is finished, uploaded to my test server so here goes:

Documentation?

First thing noticed, there is no documentation with it so I will have to do it with the older documentation from the beta. Not so good since there are additional features in the RC and I was hoping on reading about it.

So I figured I just start and see where I get :-)

Installation

Ah, maybe here is some information… So let’s try it out. I’ve looked at Review System Requirements,View Release Notes and Read Setup Help but they all pointed to DPM 2007 information. So let’s go for the Install Data Protection Manager link then.

First error, so let’s fix this first. Apparently I was still working with the CTP version of Windows Powershell 2.0 so I had to remove it first.

Second try.

Since I uninstalled Powershell, the intstallation wizard is enabling it now. This takes a long time… but finally

Of course, protection jobs cannot run during the upgrade and you need to upgrade your agents immediately afterwards but this you get each time you do an upgrade with DPM. Press Next to continue

So the prerequisite checker is running, and I seem to be not passed

So here are my prerequisites missing:

KB 962975: Dynamic Disks are marked as “Invalid” on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista when you bring the disks online, take the disks offline, or restart the computer if Data Protection Manager is installed.

KB 975759: An application or service that uses a file system filter driver may experience function failure on a computer that is running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008

and finally Windows Management Framework Core package (Windows PowerShell 2.0 and WinRM 2.0)

A reboot is needed, so we will have to start from scratch again. Lessons learnt, take these hotfixes with you when you need to install DPM 2010

So I ran back through my setup and came back to the prerequisites screen

Now everything is ok so let’s continue

Since I am upgrading, and the installation used to had a dedicated SQL instance, I will reuse it

Give the password for the local accounts that will be used.

Choose whether you want to use the Microsoft Update or not

Customer improvement experience can’t be changed during the RC, this will be possible in the RTM version of course

Upgrade has been successfully… but I have a warning tab, so let’s read

Seems logical :-)

Allright, let’s start the console and go to management.

I need to update an agent

The same warning that you always receive when upgrading something. Any running jobs will fail, and you need to do a consistency check afterwards

A big difference between 2007 is that I didn’t had to run through a wizard. I just clicked OK on the warning and the upgrade starts.

This is the error that you get when you have an agent with a previous version

The upgrade however failed

According to the newsgroups, I wasn’t the only one with this problem. After a while (the second time) it worked.

New Agent Version

The new agent version is now 3.0.7558.0

Cheers,

Mike

DPM interesting day

2010-02-10T09:37:46Z

Hey All,

A very interesting day today and yesterday as I have seen many interesting information passing by. Instead of creating a post for each of them, I will put them all together here.

First, as said in a previous post, DPM 2010 RC is out and I’m already starting to play with it.

Second, the DPM team has released a list of the Tested hardware VSS provider that are tested and found compatible with DPM for protecting virtual machines deployed on Clustered Shared Volumes.

See http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/05/tested-hardware-vss-provider-table.aspx for more information.

Another post is written on Hyper-V and protecting it with DPM 2010 beta. Some great powershell scripts are posted there for auto protecting your new virtual machines also on the Secondary DPM if you have a situation like that.

See http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/08/hyper-v-protection-with-dpm-2010-beta-how-to-automatically-protect-new-virtual-machines-on-a-secondary-dpm.aspx

Finally, there is a webcast about Reducing IT Costs in the Datacenter with System Center which I’m going to try to view as soon as possible because this sounds very interesting.

Check http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2010/02/09/reducing-it-costs-in-the-datacenter-with-system-center.aspx for the webcast

Till next, which will be about doing an upgrade from the DPM 2010 beta to RC

Cheers,

Mike

SCDPM 2010 RC is available!!!!

2010-02-09T13:21:06Z

Hey all,

It is finally there, check out the post from Jason Buffington… Time to download :-)

http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/archive/2010/02/09/data-protection-manager-2010-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Mike

Troubleshoot Sharepoint Recoveries

2010-02-04T07:30:19Z

Hey All,

Just saw a nice video about troubleshooting Sharepoint Recoveries with system center data protection manager 2007.

The video is created by Shane Brasher who is a Senior DPM Support Escalation Engineer.

You can find the video @ http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/03/troubleshooting-sharepoint-recoveries-for-dpm.aspx

In the Video, Shane demonstrates two common failures and how to find information about them.

One of these errors is not enough disk space for the recovery. It is indeed a fact that to recover something from sharepoint you need to recover the entire site. And this is sometimes overlooked by administrators. Both on the recovery farm as the production farm you need to have enough space to recover.

The error you will receive is ID 2035 and can be found in the DPM UI, eventviewer and the MSDPMCurr.errlog

And finally, it is also found back in the trace logs when you need to make them for Microsoft Support.

The other error he explained is a little more difficult to understand. What he did was recover a site but to an alternate site.

The error shown now was ID 32005: The system cannot find the file specified.

Again, this error is visible in the DPM UI, eventviewer and the MSDPMCurr.errorlog but just shows this cryptic notification.

The log you need here is the WSSCmdLetsWrapperCurr.errlog where there is a much better answer about this error.

It states that you are trying to restore a site to another location which has the wrong template so be aware.

Anyway, a must seen video for all you DPM admins out there.

Cheers,

Mike

Sharepoint 2010 and SystemCenter

2010-02-02T19:57:54Z

Hey All,

Just attended a live meeting on System Center and Sharepoint 2010 and as usual, it was looking very promising again.

Although this is the blog about Data Protection Manager I will briefly tell also about Operations Manager and Virtualization but my main focus will be on DPM.

Sharepoint is a collaboration product that is used in many companies. Many IT administrators will acknowledge that the product has become an essential asset in a business environment, but they will also acknowledge that it is a hell of a product to maintain. This is basically because of the nature of the product. Many team sites are created, project sites, document libraries and so on and for each type there is security and so on… To keep track on this, is very difficult for an IT admin. It even becomes more difficult when a user has deleted a document, site or whatever and you are in charge of recovering it.

Another big issue with Sharepoint is managing the different farms. When you only have one farm, you have one site where you can manage it, but when you have multiple, it’s getting more difficult to maintain it.

System Center should be the answer to that, beginning with Operations Manager 2007 and the new Management Pack for Sharepoint 2010.

Operations Manager

This management pack has some great advantages. To start with, the product team really has listened to the customers and the feedback that they got. In the meeting, they explained that the new Management Pack was designed specifically to manage your entire sharepoint infrastructure (which can be multiple farms) from one console. And this is great, even fantastic. And they went further. The new management pack will be able to monitor the logical entity of your infrastructure. This means that you will now have the possibility to monitor your SLA’s about sharepoint. When one server is down, but another one is up that does the same thing, your sharepoint infrastructure will be healthy for your SLA. And that is exactly what we want.

Check out the next pictures

And there’s more. They have reduced the alerting noise in the management pack. All common component monitoring such as SQL and IIS are disabled by default. Why? Because you will probably have IIS management pack and SQL management pack in your environment anyway. And if not, you still can enable these monitors. Important here is that you still will see that the sharepoint infrastructure is down, but not 5 times anymore when the problem is SQL oriented. I’m not sure if this is correct, but I think the makers of this management pack listened very carefully to the Exchange Management Pack programmers :-)

Also, they have added all features of sharepoint (search, project server, Office web apps…) into 1 management pack and into one view. So for all you OpsMgr admins out there… it will become easier to “deploy” a view to your sharepoint admins. Again, cool stuff.

Now what are the changes between 2007 and 2010

As you can see in the picture… A lot. A lot more monitors, less rules, more classes. All great news, but what more? Less reports… Huh? Less reports? This is not good. However, the team promised us that they kept only the reports that mattered. All the other reports are SQL data, IIS data and those reports are in the other management packs.

A new feature is the SPHA rules. SPHA stands for SharePoint Health Analyzer and are standard in the Sharepoint product. The good thing here is that you can create your own rules in Sharepoint (by a Sharepoint admin for example) and that Operations Manager automatically will add this to its management pack. Again, a very nice feature and one that Sharepoint admins will love to have.

Virtualization

The last topic off the day was Virtualization but was only touched lightly. Nevertheless I’m gonna give you the slide here before I start with my favorite topic ;-) SCDPM

Data Protection Manager

And this was presented by Jason Buffington (yep, him again :-)). And Jason demonstrated (this guy really loves demo’s, even with all the risks :-)) in short what we can expect for Sharepoint 2010 protection with DPM 2010.

Following screenshots demonstrate the difference between DPM 2007 (w. Sharepoint 2007) and DPM 2010 (w. Sharepoint 2010)

To make a long story short… While you need a recovery farm today, you will be recovering single documents straight to the production infrastructure tomorrow. And you will have all the possibilities for Disaster Recovery and so on too (see my previous post for more explanation on this).

As always, DPM 2010 for sharepoint proves to be another great backup solution, but not only a backup solution, it will be much more then that. The workload will be perfectly protected through DPM with quick recoveries, automatic consistency checks and SLA’s that will be easily met.

And it’s getting better. If you have a management solution that automatically deploys a DPM agent onto a new server (think Dynamic Data Center) and you deploy a new server that is part of the Sharepoint infrastructure, DPM will automatically recognize this and add it to the protection group. No more “forgetting” about the new server…

You really got to see it in action… Jason, if you read this, try convincing your boss to come over to Belgium for a meeting with the Belgium System Center User Group ;-)

My conclusion

The different teams really have listened to the remarks of the customers, influencers and MVP’s. And that’s a fantastic thing. Managing your Sharepoint infrastructure will become easier, more straightforward and better protected then ever. In the next months, when Sharepoint 2010 will go live in many companies, a lot of admins will need to discuss the System Center products to their peers also, because implementing a solution is one thing, maintaining it is different.

Will this be perfect? Probably not, but since the system center products are more “frameworks”, you can easily adapt it to your own needs, and don’t forget, the product teams actually listen to the feedback, so contact them if necessary.

Till next time.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Beta Webcast

2010-01-18T19:23:41Z

Hey All,

Last Thursday was an exiting day for all the DPM fans out there. Jason Buffington was presenting a webcast about the new features and improvements in DPM 2010, that will go RC in a couple of weeks. Jason mentioned it will probably the first full week of February.

That said, I was unable to attend the webcast. Had an appointment and couldn’t get out of it so I had to wait last weekend until it got available offline. And it is, so here are the highlights.

First, and certainly not last, Jason was rocking again ;-), he knows how to get you enthusiastic about a “backup” solution. Great work Jason.

Second, and probably more important, what was in the webcast…

It all started with an overview picture of the differences between DPM 2007 and 2010. And although there are a few differences in the workloads that can be protected, such as Exchange 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Dynamics natively, Hyper-V R2 on CSV etc…, that really aren’t the most exiting things about the new release. In fact, that is what everybody expected in the first place when the new version arrived. No, as the webcast continued, many great features and enhancements came in sight, causing this to become a truly, full-blown, protection application. Yes, you have read it correctly, not a backup system, but a protection system because in my opinion, it is more then just a backup solution. With features of backup up to other protection servers, in other geographical locations, end-user recovery for files AND for SQL administrators, with more and more applications from Microsoft where you can have single-item restore, this will be an application that every windows administrator need to have a look at.

Jason continued the session with a statement:

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 delivers unified data protection for Windows servers and clients as a best-of-breed backup & recovery solution from Microsoft, for Windows environments. DPM 2010 provides the best protection and most supportable restore scenarios from disk, tape and cloud – in a scalable, reliable, manageable and cost-effective way.

Now here is a hard statement :-). But in fact, if you will read further on, you will notice that the team behind DPM 2010 really has pushed the limit for making this version an enterprise-ready solution, that can back-up everything you want, including desktops and laptops, servers, server loads and so on, with one agent. DPM 2007 was already a great solution, but the problem was that there were some issues that needed to be resolved. And not only that, some functionality was missing too. But here we are, 2010 almost live and it seems that they have listened to the customers. Just keep reading :-)

All right, what are the exact workloads on Windows Platforms?

DPM 2010 will support:

Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008
Windows Storage Server 2008
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2
Windows Storage Server 2003 SP1
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2
Windows Unified Data Storage Server
Windows 7
Windows Vista (business or higher)
Windows XP Pro SP2

And here is the list of workloads:

SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2000 SP4
SAP running on SQL Server (Although this is not a “known” workload in the GUI, you still can protect it, search for the white paper on how to do that)
Exchange 2010, including DAG
Exchange 2007, including LCR, CCR and SCR
Exchange 2003 SP2
Sharepoint Server 2010
Sharepoint Server 2007
Sharepoint portal server 2003
Sharepoint Foundation 2010
Sharepoint Services version 3.0
Sharepoint Services version 2.0
Dynamics AX 2009
Essentials Business Server 2008
Small Business Server 2008

After that, they gave us some more information about the features of these products:

File Services

Not much has changed here, from Windows Server 2003 till 2008 R2 with the possibility for End-Users to restore directly from Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office

Here are already some nice new things, such as the possibility to protect entire SQL instances, with the protection of new databases. Also the amount of databases that you can protect is much higher as before. It will be now possible to protect a 1000 databases per protection server. Last but not least, and something a lot of SQL administrators will like a lot, is the possibility to have a self-service restore tool.

Oh, maybe one more, DPM will have the possibility to recover 2005 databases to 2008 servers.

Sharepoint

Here we have the protection of sharepoint 2010, 2007 and 2003, with the possibility of auto-protection for new content databases within the farm. For sharepoint 2010, it will be possible to do an item-level restore without the need of a recovery farm. Yep, I already hear the sharepoint admins doing a little dance :-)

Exchange

While DPM 2010 will support Exchange 2010, 2007 and 2003, it will have now optimizations for SCC, CCR, SCR and DAG. And what’s also important, it will do the ESE workload away from your exchange server and pull it to the DPM server. This will save you some resources for the actual mail servers.

Bare Metal Recovery, which will be centrally managed, and locally executed.

Virtualization

Host-level backup of hyper-V R2, CSV support, Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (Yes, you have read this correct!), Alternate Host Recovery and Item Level Recovery. Writing up a DR plan with this kind of tools will become a pleasure ;-)

Next on Topic… Client Protection.

Now here’s something exiting. While backup people such as myself always shout to end-users that they need to place their files on fileservers, take backups of their locally data and so on, to prevent data loss, this has come to an end. DPM 2010 really enhances the backup experience for clients. Some may wonder why it is necessary. Users should place all of their files on the fileserver. Well, that’s true, but be honest, with that many laptops and road warriors out there (such as myself) it has become almost impossible for end-users to do this.

With DPM 2010, you will be able to backup a 1000 clients per server, and you will be only backing up user data. You will have the possibility, based on templates (or rules, call it whatever you want :-)) to choose which folders you want to backup. At first sight, there are quite a lot of rules to choose from, and of course, the wanted “don’t backup any MP3’s” exist. Also, and this is getting very interessting, you will have the possibility to let the user choose some folders himself.

And it’s getting better. DPM 2007, who already could backup clients would start to nag if a client doesn’t report within the requested timeframe, causing your DPM GUI to have a lot of red crosses. And that’s something that you don’t want. With 2010, you will be able to say that everything is ok, as long as the last succeeded backup is within a specified timeframe, 2 weeks for example. At the same time, travelers will still have offline local copies with them so that they can restore whenever they want. And the moment they connect to the network through VPN, a new backup is taken online. One minor though, DirectAccess is not yet supported, so here’s something we will need to wait until SP1 (at least I hope)

Another great new feature, and one which is requested a lot during the lifecycle of DPM 2007 is workgroup protection. I already mentioned it on one of my previous posts, but now it is official. In the RC and RTM version of DPM 2010, you will have the possibility to protect workgroup based computers or for that matter, servers from non-trusted domains. How will it work? First you install manually the agent (or use SCCM or SCE to do it for you). Use the SETDPMServer command with a new parameter called IsNONDomainServer. This will generate a local user on your server (don’t worry, not an administrator :-))

Back on the DPM server, you can use the GUI to attach this server, together with the account to the DPM. That’s it. Just make sure that the firewall(s) allow DCOM (135) and WinSock (5718/5719)

You want more… Here goes.

During the demo’s, Justin showed some great additional enhancements to the core product. If you are already using DPM 2007, you will recognize these, and yes, you will love the new enhancements…

The product team has invested a lot of time in resolving the false positives. They learned from their big brothers from the Operations Team and reduced the alert noise a lot. But not only that, there is now also the option for collocation of data. Now you won’t need a volume for each protected part in your environment. This will speed up things nicely. They have also built-in the possibility to allow your volume to grow automatically. This means no more changing the size of the volume each time you’re without. Now you just need to read your reports more often :-)

And last but not least, there is now a function that will automatically do a consistency check, if DPM thinks that there’s an issue. This will lower the workload on many DPM admins out there.

Disaster Recovery

Many DPM users will tell you that they really like the Secondary Protection DPM server. If it is geographically on another location, you can do your tape-based backups on that one, leaving the tapes in the tapeloader as it is on another location. In 2010, they go further.

Now it will be possible to protect some workloads with Server A and do the secondary protection with Server B. At the same time, you can protect some workloads with Server B and do the secondary protection with Server A. Not enough? No problem, you will be able to add Server C in this scenario. I’m thinking Disaster Recovery Plan and I’m thinking this is a no-brainer :-)

Final Topic, some Figures

DPM 2010 is called enterprise ready, and here’s why.

DPM 2010 will be able to protect 100 servers, 1000 Laptops and up to 2000 databases per server.
It is tested with sharepoint farms of 25 TB and over 1 million items
There is a significantly increased fan-in of data sources per DPM server
It can handle 80 TB per DPM server
Automatic rerunning of jobs and improved self-healing is implemented
Automatic protection of new data sources for SQL and MOSS
Decreased Inconsistent Replicas errors
Reduced Alert Noise
Optimized tape logic for tape reservations and usage
Library Sharing more resilient
Better resilience to physical errors in drives and changers
Task controller for tape jobs for higher throughput
More flexibility in scheduling short- and long-term tape

Conclusion:

Is this a product to look out for? Yes, certainly. DPM 2007 already changed a lot in the backup world, and 2010 is an improvement over 2007. I’m glad to see that (Although there are a few) Microsoft has taken the time to listen and that they have done some major improvements in the engine and not only presented new features. Are the new features worth the upgrade? Yep, certainly if you will need to protect the additional workloads, but also for your tape support, less daily work as a backup admin…

Do we need to wait until SP1? A good question, and for the moment I would say no, as it will be possible to upgrade from Beta to RC to RTM. The Beta, which I’m currently running is already a great product, but since some additional changes have been made to the RC, I will need to check that out if its as stable as the Beta.

That’s it for today, a (short :-)) overview of the new features and enhancements, all taken from the webcast by Jason Buffington. Make sure to view that webcast if I got your attention through this post ;-)

Till next post,

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Powershell Script – Hyper-V Auto-Protection

2010-01-08T12:48:43Z

Hey All,

Microsoft has released a sample powershell script for enabling DPM 2010 auto-protection of Hyper-V

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=46d51b5a-5827-43f6-84f5-ce33f4a8e6c3&displaylang=en

From the Microsoft Site

Overview

In any virtualized environment, adding new VMs is a frequent operation. While backup administrators can protect an entire Hyper-V host using the DPM Management Console, the protection group had to be modified manually to include the new virtual machines that have come up on the Hyper-V host. These scripts are expected to work with DPM 2010 Beta. By using them, you should be able to quickly put together a script that can enable the auto protection of your hyper-v hosts. Note: These scripts work on an existing protection group and do not create a fresh protection group. The attached scripts automate the task of adding any new virtual machines recognized in the Hyper-V hosts protected by the DPM server into existing protection groups. There are different scripts for Hyper-V clusters (AddNewClusteredVM.ps1) and standalone Hyper-V hosts (AddNewStandAloneVM.ps1). You would still use the script for standalone servers to automatically protect the non-clustered virtual machines of any Hyper-V host that is part of a cluster.

The problem is that I couldn’t find the AddNewClusteredVM.ps1 script. Luckily there is a link that’s available from the Ctrl P blog which also explains in depth the scripts.

http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2009/12/03/hyper-v-protection-with-dpm-2010-beta-how-to-automatically-protect-new-virtual-machines.aspx

Enjoy

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: TCP Chimney and Bandwidth throttling

2009-12-22T15:22:00Z

Hey All, I’ve seen a number of cases where the backup of hyper-v guests is failing and also where the backup is extremely slow. Almost every time, some small adjustments need to be made to fix them, but if you are not the network administrator or hardware administrator, this can cause a lot of discussions. Suppose you have a DPM server with all the latest patches till date, a hyper-v host and some virtual machines. You are of course also backing up other stuff from other servers. You notice...(read more)

System Center Data Protection Manager: Cool script

2009-12-21T19:51:10Z

Hey All,

One of my colleagues is managing a rather large environment on a daily base. He has to manage two backup solutions (HP Data Protector and SCDPM) that share one tape library. From time to time, he need to set a tape not free in that library (Otherwise SCDPM will use that tape while it is needed for the HP solution). To do his work faster, he created a small powershell script where he has to give the name of the slot in order to mark that tape as not free.

So here it is:

$LIB = Get-DPMLibrary -DPMServerName "<servernaam>"

$TP1 = Get-Tape -DPMLibrary $LIB

$TapeLocationList = Read-Host "Tape location (Slot-x) "

foreach ($media in $TP1)

{

if ($TapeLocationList -contains $media.Location)

{

Set-Tape -Tape $media -NotFree

Echo "Tape in $($media.Location) marked as NOT FREE."

}

else

{

Echo "Tape in location $($media.Location) is not in requested slot."

}

Enjoy

Cheers,

Mike

PS: Thanks to Steven Van der Taelen for writing this script

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: Bare Metal Recovery of Windows Server 2008

2009-12-09T08:54:00Z

Hey All,

Microsoft has updated its whitepaper Bare Metal Recovery of Windows Server 2008 with System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1

It can be found at http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/A/B/2AB50D28-D892-4BF3-B823-C62CA02E4CF8/DPM%202007%20SP1%20Bare%20Metal%20Recovery%20of%20Windows%20Server%202008.doc

Important to know is that the DPM SRT (System Recovery Tool) that is used for recovering windows 2003 and windows XP has been completely replaced by the built-in backup utility of Windows server 2008, the WSB (Windows Server Backup) utility.

In the white-paper, they give a step-by-step instruction on how to enable bare metal recovery of a windows server 2008

Except for the fact that you need to do some additional work, this procedure certainly has some possibilities for the BMR of a physical windows server 2008.

Still, I believe more in the procedure of working with the offline P2V which was discussed two weeks ago. Since Matthijs Vreeken has responded on my questions I’m gonna keep working on this procedure and test it out.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 – SQL End-user Recovery

2009-12-02T08:57:00Z

Hey All,

While reading up on the different blogs I follow, I found this interesting post from Anders Bengtsson, Microsoft MVP.

It’s all about SQL End-user Recovery. In DPM 2010, it is possible to give SQL Administrators the rights to recover their databases without the need for a backup administrator.

See the article for the technical specifications (http://contoso.se/blog/?p=1130)

The end-user recovery drew my attention for the following reasons:

- End-user recovery makes the live of a backup administrator more easy. In 2007, when we implement the end-user recovery for files for users, we notice every time again, that the backup administrators are having less work

- Doing this for SQL administrators gives you an additional advantage. Imagine that you have a test environment at your site. This test environment is a virtualized “copy” of your production environment. The programmers team is doing different things there and testing new features and so on. They need a refresh of the database very often. Now the SQL team can do this instead of the backup administrator. How cool is that. You as a backup administrator have less work, the programmers team will be helped more quickly, it’s a win win situation :-)

Now I am wondering if Microsoft would pull this further? What if we could delegate end-user recovery tasks for exchange, sharepoint and so on…

For the moment this is not possible, or at least I don’t have no documentation about this yet, but when I see the power of the SQL end-user recovery, I’m quite sure that this will be a much requested feature for the future

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: Sharepoint issues

2009-12-02T08:28:00Z

Hey All,

One of our engineers was having a big issue with the protection of a sharepoint farm. In DPM, he could not resolve the following error:

The replica of SSPComponent_SSP Intranet on servername is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check.

He has searched a lot on the problem but finally found that the problem was not with the DPM program but with the Sharepoint configuration.

The problem was that some service accounts tried to do a remote log-on to the server. These service accounts are used for the timer / search server functions and had the appropriate rights locally but did not had the rights to do this remotely.

After adding the service account the rights to “logon as a batch” and “logon as a service” it suddenly started to work again.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Tape problems

2009-11-25T16:10:00Z

Hey All,

During one of the implementations of DPM, one of my colleagues got into problems with the recognition of a tape library. Although the tape library worked during the staging phase, when it got into production, it stopped working. There were 20 tapes in the library, but DPM didn’t recognize them, and after you ran a fast recovery, you got the following error:

Connection to the DPM service has been lost.

DPM service could be running in recovery mode, which was initiated by the DpmSync tool. If DpmSync is not running and the DPM service is still in recovery mode, then run DpmSync again.

After having multiple steps with the Microsoft support team, they finally found a solution. Because I thought the process of troubleshooting was interesting, I thought I posted it here.

1) Try the obvious

- Make sure that you have run the DPMDriveMappingTool.exe

2) If you want to log a call with MS Support:

- Run a DPM MPS report, the tool can be downloaded @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=14392186-6707-45a5-8987-29665abbd6f5&displaylang=en

Out of the reports that we have sent to them, they saw that “More than one mediapool reported for same media”.

Apparently, this can happen each time the DPM database has incorrect information about the tape drives, which can be caused when OEM drivers are updated when the vendorID’s and productID’s change.

Now to solve this one, you need to run a query that will reset the tables. They gave us two procedures for that, depending on whether the tape library is shared or not.

Here they are:

PROCEDURE-1) STANDALONE (non-shared) TAPE LIBRARY CONFIGURATION REPAIR STEPS
===============================================================================
1) Close DPM UI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open the Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
9) Open DPM UI
10) Go to library management tab
11) Do rescan
12) Let this rescan succeed. This rescan will detect libraries and will run Fast
inventory on the library.

PROCEDURE-2) SHARED LIBRARY CONFIGURATION REPAIR STEPS
===========================================================
(step i) On Library DPM server :
1) Close DPM UI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open the Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
(step ii) On Client DPM server :
1) Close DPMUI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
9) Now run SetSharedDPMDatabase tool with parameter as the library server instance
name (if this does not succeed then reboot the machine and again retry running the
tool)
IE: SetSharedDPMdatabase -Instancename
<dpmservername-hosting-Global-SQL-Server>\MS$DPM2007$
(step iii) on Library DPM server
1) Open DPM UI and then on Client DPM Server.
2) Go to library management tab
3) Do rescan
4) Let this rescan succeed. This rescan will detect libraries and will run Fast
inventory on the library. Let this finish before going to next step
(step iv) on Client DPM server
1) Open DPM UI and then on Client DPM Server.
2) Go to library management tab
3) Do rescan

And finally, of course, you need the query. Because it is way too long to upload the text here, I’ll ask the site owners to upload the query to the media library on scug.be

// Update, just found out that you can attach something to a post. So here it is... query.txt :-)

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager: Disaster Recovery

2009-11-25T09:07:00Z

Hey All,

One of the most difficult things there is with backup solutions is Disaster Recovery. Certainly when you want to do a bare-metal recovery of an old physical machine that has died on you. Although you can have many possibilities to recover from such a failure, most of them will cause tricks, workarounds, hoping that you can find a server with the same (or almost the same) hardware configuration and lots of time. Matthijs Vreeken (SCDPM.Blogspot.com) has written an interesting post about this (http://scdpm.blogspot.com/2009/11/disaster-recover-using-p2v-and-dpm.html)

Here’s the theory.

You do a P2V of an existing physical server but leave it off afterwards (Assuming Hyper-V here, so that DPM can take a full backup of the VHD and config files). Every day, you take a backup of the system state and daily data of the physical machine.

At the moment the physical server dies on you, you start the virtual server, restore data and you’re back up and running.

Pitfalls

He also mentions some possible issues that you can have during the start of the virtual machine. (Read at his post for more information)

Although this sounds great in theory (I was already on my way to my boss to discuss this ;-)) I still have a few questions about this.

1) What will happen if the physical server has a different patch level? Will it be necessary to patch both servers @ the same time?

2) You need to keep the system state of the physical server in case you want to go back to the physical server. But if you already have resetted the password for the computer account of the virtual machine, what will happen then?

3) How will an exchange or SQL server will handle this? After all, this will be an online restore.

4) How will the DPM agent react on the virtual machine? What are you going to do when the DPM agent has been upgraded in the meantime.

…

The idea sounds really great, and I don’t want to throw it away although I still have a few questions about it. So if you have idea’s remarks or solutions for the questions, don’t hesitate to reply :-). I’m going to continue to think about it because if we can find a rock-solid solution or process for this, it could become a very popular solution for a disaster recovery plan. Share your ideas….

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Knowledgebase article for the new hotfix package is now available

2009-11-11T16:17:00Z

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;976542

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Recatalog an expired tape

2009-11-11T16:14:00Z

Hey All,

Ever needed to get data from a tape that is already expired? In DPM, you won’t have the option anymore to recatalog the tape when it is expired.

Santhosh Sivarajan from Houston has found a simple workaround:

* Select the tape and mark the tape as free

* Select the tape again and unmark the tape as free

* Now you can choose Recatalog imported tape

The original post can be found here:

http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/santhosh/archive/2009/10/29/recatalog-an-expired-tape.aspx

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection 2010: New cloud offering?

2009-11-10T12:43:00Z

Hey All,

Microsoft is really pushing the car for could offerings. It has recently announced that it has established a partnership with i365, the software company of Seagate, to provide could-based data protection for DPM 2010.

The offering would integrate i365’s EVault data protection software and cloud-connected storage infrastructure with DPM 2010.

The announcement can be found here:

http://www.i365.com/assets/downloads/press/pr_2009_11_9.html

More information is found here:

http://www.i365.com/solutions/microsoft/index.html

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: New hotfix package

2009-11-10T11:50:00Z

Dear All,

A new hotfix package has been released by Microsoft for DPM 2007. It can be downloaded @

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=74ac7461-dbfe-4bc1-85a2-4d2948f30e42

The knowledgebase article is not yet available for the moment but I guess it will arrive soon :-)

Cheers,

Mike

DPM2007 system state backup error : ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB

2009-10-30T13:00:00Z

DPM 2007 message: DPM failed to create the system state backup. If you are trying to create the system state of a Windows 2008 Server operating system, verify that the Windows Server Backup (WSB) is installed, and that there is enough free disk space on the protected server to store the system state. (ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB) when going to the server that needs to backed up we have the following messages in the application eventlog: Log Name: Application Source: Microsoft...(read more)

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Errors by example…

2009-10-17T17:37:00Z

Hey All,

Recently I had to troubleshoot a DPM installation that suddenly didn’t work anymore. After investigation (and having a lot of troubles finding something) I’ve noticed the following errors in the event viewer.

So I started to check everything on SQL level and discovered that the DPM jobs were running as a domain user (a so called service account with log on rights…)

So I looked at Services and discovered that the DPM instance and the SQL Agent for that instance were running under that service account.

After changing it back to the local user MICROSOFT$DPM$ACCT and restarting the server, everything worked back as a charm.

Hope it helps,

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager V3: Worth to look at?

2009-10-07T18:44:00Z

Hey All,

Just been a week in vacation with the wife and kids and had a great time swimming, walking and playing in the playgrounds with the children. Now that the DPM V3 Public Beta is announced and there, I thought it was time again to look at the promised features for V3 and to check if the product is worth our attention. (Hey, a silent evening in a cottage, with the kids and wife sleeping, a good glass wine in my hand and some good music on… ;-))

So here’s what’s new, based on what was already in V2

For Exchange: Of course they will support E14 in addition to Ex2007 and Ex2003. There will also be improved Restore Granularity. What exactly is not known yet but the DPM team worked together with the Exchange team to see what is possible and supported.

For SQL: You will be able to protect an entire SQL instance, making that DPM will auto discover new DB’s within that instance. DPM v3 will also be able to protect 1000 DB’s per DPM server which is a huge improvement over the 300 DB’s that v2 could. There will also be Role-Based Access for a SQL admin to do his or hers work with the DPM console.

For Sharepoint: Support for Office 14, Sharepoint server 2007 and 2003. There will be no recovery farm requirement for Office 14 and auto-detection of new content databases within the farm.

For Hyper-V: Item-level restore from VHD backup, support for Hyper-V2 deployments using Live Migration (CSV) and Dynamic VM guest migration support (Meaning you should be able to restore to alternate Hyper-V hosts)

What’s completely new?

For AD: Active Directory will now appear as a data source and not be part anymore of the system state. This will allow IT administrators to centrally manage backups from DPM (although performed locally) and local admin restore from windows server backup. It will also allow to do a DPM restoration of a whole domain controller.

For Bare Metal Recovery: Windows Server 2003 will continue with SRT but windows server 2008 will use Windows Server Backup for image-based restore, again centrally managed from DPM but locally executed.

For New Datasources: Protection of windows guests on VMWare hosts will be supported and Microsoft Dynamics AX will be a new datasource. SAP running on SQL server will also be a new datasource

For Laptops: Backup over VPN will be possible where Windows seven is of course the new OS that will be included. Per DPM server you will be able to scale up to 1000 clients. Only Unique user data will be protected so that not the entire OS is repeatedly on your expensive storage ;-). DPM will also integrate with local shadow copies for Vista and Windows 7 which will be centrally configured from the DPM Admin User Interface BUT the end user will be able to restore from local copies offline and online as well as from DPM copies online.

Server Side:

DPM V3 promises to be Enterprise Ready where the scalability is increased and each DPM server will now have the possibility of having 80 TB of storage.

New Management Pack updates will be ready for SCOM and SQL admins will have Role-based management at their hands.

The one thing I am really looking forward to is the fact that MS promises to give us automatic rerunning of jobs and improved self-healing. Also the automatic protection of new SQL databases or MOSS content databases seems very promising. They also promised less “Inconsistent Replicas” errors and they will reduce the Alert Volume.

The DPM to DPM replication will also be improved and (more important I think) there will be a One-click DPM DP failover and failback scenario available. Also improved scheduling will be there.

For the SAN restore, there will be continued support using scripts and whitepapers that are delivered through the vendors but there’s no change with the previous version.

And last but not least, the DPM server should be 64-bit and W2k08 or better.

Conclusion: This seems like a lot of improvements and definitely worth to check it out

Next post: Installation of DPM v3 Beta

Cheers,

Mike

DPM 2010 Beta is available now

2009-09-30T15:04:56Z

DPM 2010 beta is now available for download. Read the blog post from the dpm team http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2009/09/29/DPM-2010-beta-is-available-now.aspx

Notice that DPM 2010 is only supported on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008.

Download the DPM 2010 beta here https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=840&DownloadID=22070&wa=wsignin1.0

Have Fun,

Alexandre Verkinderen

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: New release for KB970867

2009-09-16T09:26:00Z

Hey All,

Yesterday, Microsoft has released a new version of KB970867 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970867), although the KB article is not yet updated, the new download is already available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=14e1a04b-2323-4344-b737-a3194b9ab3ed&displaylang=en

So let’s see if I can use this download on my test environment. I’ve installed the hotfix on my environment and after the installation, I’ve opened the console

I can see immediately Update Available so I decided to do the update to check if the protected servers need to restart

Press Update Agents to start

Make sure you select Manually restart the selected servers later

After the upgrade, I can see that the version of the agent is changed to 2.0.8851.0

Cheers,

Mike

UPDATE: In the meantime, the associated KB is online. It is a quite impressive list of fixes… http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;970868

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Examples of Errors (2)

2009-09-11T18:36:00Z

Hey All,

In our series of posts about DPM Errors:

DPM tried to do a SQL log backup, either as part of a backup job or a recovery to latest point in time job. The SQL log backup job has detected a discontinuity in the SQL log chain for SQL Server 2005 database database <name database> since the last backup. All incremental backup jobs will fail until an express full backup runs. (ID 30140 Details: Internal error code: 0x80990D11)

Resolution: After investigation, it seemed that the problem was that there were also backups performed straight from the SQL Management Studio. Stopping these backups resolved the issue. See also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970642

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Examples of Errors

2009-09-10T11:33:00Z

Hey All,

Today I got this error in a DPM console

DPM is unable to retrieve the configuration from <servername> (ID 346 Details: System could not the required space in a registry log)

The problem here was that the specific server was out of disk space on the C: drive. Cleaning that drive fixed the problem

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer for DPM

2009-09-09T18:13:00Z

Hey All,

I’ve got an interesting link from Alkin, SCOM MVP (Thanks!) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=54b4bb57-d6e3-4c1e-a889-a24cfa18fcd4&displaylang=en

Microsoft has released a Baseline Configuration Analyzer for DPM. So I started with downloading it and wanted to try immediately.

So I opened my test DPM environment and started with the installer on my Windows Server 2008 x64.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a success…

First I installed the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer (x64) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DB70824D-ABAE-4A92-9AA2-1F43C0FA49B3&displaylang=en

And after installing that tool I started with the installation of the DPM tool. I received this error:

I found it strange that the C++ 2008 Redistributable wasn’t installed on my machine but I followed the link to check and found out that the link was for the x32 platform. So I downloaded the x64 version but as I suspected, it was already installed on my machine. So no go overhere.

If finally decided to install the tool on my laptop because in the details it states that it can be run remotely.

After downloading the 32 bit versions of the two tools, I started the installation and when I wanted to start the DPM tool installation, I got the following notification:

Ok, now problem here, so I installed the DPM Shell on my laptop and all the updates (SP1 and KB970867) and tried the installation again. Finally success :-)

Now let’s run this tool:

So I added the name of my server (FQDN because my test environment is in another domain then my laptop)

and filled in the credentials for that server. These credentials had local admin rights

So here’s a suprise. To be able to run the tool, the user used need to have local administrator rights on the computer from where the tool is run.

Because I really wanted to know what the results would be, I decided to use my local credentials for running the tool and added myself as local administrator on the DPM server in the other domain (Production environment and test environment have a full trust so I could play a little bit ;-))

And here you can find a screenshot of the results…

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager: Error when lowering the allocated storage

2009-09-02T14:00:00Z

Yesterday I was working on a DPM installation and made a mistake when I was working on a protection group and I needed to change the size of the allocated storage. I made the mistake by lowering the size and pressing the TAB button and suddenly the DPM console crashed. Here’s what I did:

Go to the DPM Console –> Protection.

Choose the correct protection group and press the Modify Allocation button.

Press the Calculate button

After this, I changed the size of the replica to 10 GB and pressed the tab key.

Et voila,

Till now, this bug is confirmed by Microsoft and not yet solved… ;-)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973677

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: New course and Exam

2009-08-24T08:26:00Z

Hey All,

Just to let you know, now there is a new course for DPM available from Microsoft Learning:

Course 50213A – Implementing Data Protection Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?ID=50213A

There is also now an exam on DPM

Exam 70-658: TS: System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Configuring

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-658

More information can also be found on All Backed Up: http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/archive/2009/08/17/new-dpm-courseware-and-exam-now-available.aspx

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Installation Part III: Patching, patching and patching

2009-08-23T13:24:00Z

Allright, here is part 3 of the installation of System Center Data Protection Manager. This is the part where we are going to install a lot of hotfix rollups and hotfixes.

To have a good DPM installation, these hotfixes are needed or otherwise, you will have a lot of problems. So here goes and here is the list of necessary hotfixes:

Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: February
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963102
- Fixes 6 issues
- Download contains 3 files.
Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: April
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968579
- Fixes 14 issues
- Download contains 3 files.
Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: June
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970867
- Fixes 9 issues
- Download contains 3 files
An Update is available for Windows Server 2008-based computers to address issues with backing up and restoring Hyper-V Virtual Machines
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959962
- Fixes 3 issues
- gg
A replica may be listed as inconsistent after you install System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 on a computer that is running an x64-based version of Windows Server 2003
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961502
- Fixes 1 issue
- Download contains 1 file
Availability of a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) update rollup package for Windows Server 2003 to resolve some VSS snapshot issues
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940349
- Fixes 7 issues
- Contains 1 file for x86, 1 for x64, 1 for Itanium based systems

Now this looks like a lot of updates / hotfixes to install, but luckily, not all are necessary. Because the Hotfix rollup package of June contains the previous ones (April and February) and also KB 9615012

So that leaves us with KB 970867, KB 959962 and KB 940349

KB 940349 is needed if your DPM server is running win2k03 (not in my case) but is also needed on EVERY windows 2003 server that will be protected by DPM. Also note that this KB is best installed BEFORE you push an agent to that server.

KB 959962 is necessary when you want to protect virtual machines. This update need to be installed on the Host Hyper-V systems and afterwards, you need to upgrade all the integration services on the virtual machines.

And the Hotfix rollup (KB 970867) will need to be installed on the DPM server.

Here’s how:

First, run the x64_DataProtectionManager2007-KB970867 (or the x86 variant)

Again, you get the same notifications as you received with the SP1 update. Please also note that you will need to restart your DPM server if you didn’t installed the rollups before (As it is in my case) or when the DPM Console or Management Shell is open.

The license agreement

The installation

Again the question for the Microsoft Update (I really start to wonder here ;-))

And in the end he asks me to open the DPM console, and apparently I didn’t need to reboot after all.

Second part of the installation is the SQLPrep package, unless you are running the dedicated instance on the DPM server as I do, so I don’t need to run this one.

Finally, you will need to run the Management Shell update on all computers where you have the Management Shell installed.

When that is all done, you need to start the DPM Management console and update the agents

Press the Update Available link for each agent.

Press Yes to continue. The system tells you that you will need to run a consistency check afterwards.

Press the Update Agents button.

Now you need to fill in your credentials. Make sure that you select the Manually restart the selected servers later because it is NOT necessary to restart the servers afterwards.

The system is upgrading the agent.

Finished.

That’s it. In the next posts we will be giving a further demonstration on how to configure DPM.

Till then,

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Installation Part II: The program and SP1

2009-08-23T09:03:00Z

Hey All, here is part two of the installation manual for SCDPM. In the previous part, we have prepared our environment and installed the prerequisites. Now it is time to install the software itself and this part exists out of two steps:

Step 1: Installation of SCDPM RTM

After you start the installation, this is the first screen you get:

Choose Install Data Protection Manager. Please note that this will automatically install the DPM Management Shell

As always, accept the License Terms

The Welcome screen, press next to continue

The installation wizard will now run a prerequisite check to verify if everything is ok.

Now the product registration

In this window, you need to select the SQL instance you want to use or create a new SQL installation which will be a dedicated one. Note that DPM is only supported on a SQL 2005 environment. In fact, you will not get past this screen if you try to install it on a SQL 2008 environment because the installer checks it. In my case, I will go for the dedicated SQL installation which is the best solution in my opinion. (After all, if your SQL server dies, you want to be able to restore it. How are you going to start with it if you don’t have the DPM SQL anymore :-)

If you have chosen for the local dedicated installation, you need to choose a strong password for 2 local restricted accounts. Make sure it is a strong one as these accounts their passwords don’t expire. The accounts are:

MICROSOFT$DPM$Acct: This account runs the SQL Server service and the SQL Server Agent service
DPMR$<nameserver>: This account securely generates reports

Then press Next to continue

Here you can choose whether you want to use Microsoft Update or not. Depending on the policies of your company you can choose to put this on or off.

Choose whether you want to make use of the Customer Experience Improvement Program

Finally you get the summary and we are ready for the installation.

This is a screen during the installation. Notice that in my case the SQL Server installation is busy.

And finally, it is finished. You get a link to get the latest updates for the product, but since we are going to install immediately Service Pack 1, I didn’t bother to visit the link :-)

Last but not least, you get this notification

I’ve tried to start the installation of SP1 without restarting but that doesn’t work :-)

Step 2: Installation of Service Pack 1

The first thing the installer did before starting with the installation was the installation of the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Setup

Of course you need to accept the license agreement.

This installation took a matter of seconds.

And now the upgrade of SP1 starts. The first thing it does is inform you of possible issues that can arise during the upgrade:

Any jobs that are in progress or that are scheduled during the install will fail
The installation will backup the DPM database
The process can take a large amount of time if you protect a large or multiple large sharepoint farms.

These warnings are no problem for my installation as I don’t have any sharepoint farms or jobs for the moment since I am upgrading from a clean installation.

Again you need to accept the License Terms, and in the top bar you can see that this service pack is also known as KB 959605

No further configuration here, since it is an upgrade and the installation is busy

Again the question about the Microsoft Update (If you choose yes, you would get an additional screen for the update settings… but as I said, I prefer that this is arranged on organization level)

And the finish, notifying that you need to restart.

I’ve tried to start DPM without restarting but then you get this error:

After restarting, I was able to get into the DPM console

In the next part, I will discuss the various rollups and hotfixes that are necessary to install.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Installation Part I: Prerequisites

2009-08-23T09:02:00Z

Hey All,

In the next 3 posts, an installation guide for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Let’s start with explaining the environment I’ve used and the prerequisites.

First, let’s look at the prerequisites as they are provided by Microsoft. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb808832.aspx)

First, the security requirements

1) Security Requirements

To install DPM you must be a local admin and logon to the computer where you want to install DPM. OK, this can be arranged :-)

After the installation of DPM, you need to have a domain user with administrator access to use the DPM Administrator Console. Basically, this means that when you need to be able to use the administrator console, you need to be a local administrator on the DPM server.

2) Network Requirements

According to Microsoft, you need to have a windows server 2003 or windows server 2008 active directory domain. My testenvironment is a native windows server 2008 domain so no problems there. You also need to have persistent connectivity with the servers and desktop computers it protects and if you are protecting data across a WAN, then you need to have a minimum network bandwidth of 512kbps. So far so good

3) Hardware Requirements

Disks: You should have a disk that contains the storage pool and one that is dedicated to system files, DPM installation files, prerequisite software and database files. Basically, this means that you need an OS and program files just as any other server (you can divide it into multiple volumes) but the storage dedicated for the backups can’t be the same as above. When DPM takes the storage, it allocates it and it is not usable for something else.

CPU: Minimum 1Ghz, Recommended 2.33 Ghz

Memory: Minimum 2 GB RAM, Recommended 4 GB Ram

Pagefile: 0.2 percent the size of all recovery point volumes combined, in addition to the recommended size (1.5 times the Memory)

Disk Space:

- Minimum: Program Files: 410 MB, Database: 900 MB, System Drive: 2650 MB

- Recommended: 2 till 3 GB of free space on the program files volume

Disk Space for storage pool: 1,5 Times the size of the protected data, recommended = 2 – 3 times the size of the protected data

LUNS: Maximum of 17 TB for GPT dynamic disks, 2 TB for MBR disks

32-bit servers: 150 data sources

64-bit servers: 300 data sources

Since this will be a test environment, there is no way I’m going to follow the complete requirements for DPM. :-)

4) Operating System Prerequisites

32-bit or 64-bit servers. No ia64 bit is supported

The DPM server cannot be a management server for SCOM

The DPM server cannot be an application server or an DC server.

There is a VSS limitation on 32-bit servers. It can’t outgrow 10 TB of protected data. Preferred is 4 TB on a 32-bit server.

OS: Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise Edition or Windows Server 2003 (R2) SP2 or later or Windows server 2003 Advanced server or Windows Server 2003 Storage server.

The management shell can also be run on windows XP SP2, Vista and Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later.

My Environment

I will run the server on a Hyper-V platform (Not yet R2) and I’ve created a virtual machine with the following specifications

CPU: 2 * 3.60 GHz Xeon

Memory: 2048 MB

Storage: C:\ 40 GB (OS and application) D:\ 60 GB (Play storage for backup)

OS: Windows Server 2008 x64 SP2, Fully patched

Software Prerequisites

Before I started with the installation, I’ve installed following things first:

- IIS 7 with the following options on:

Common HTTP Features
- Static Content
- Default Document
- Directory Browsing
- HTTP Errors
- HTTP Redirection
Application Development
- ASP.NET
- .NET Extensibility
- ISAPI Extensions
- ISAPI Filters
- Server Side Includes
Health and Diagnostics
- HTTP Logging
- Request Monitor
Security
- Windows Authentication
- Request Filtering
Performance
- Static Content Compression
Management Tools
- IIS Management Console (not really a prerequisite but handy ;-))
- IIS 6 Management Compatibility
  - IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility
  - IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
  - IIS 6 Scripting Tools
  - IIS 6 Management Console

- SIS (Single Instance Store)

To enable this, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and run the following command:

start /wait ocsetup.exe SIS-Limited /Quiet /norestart

After this is finished, restart the server. To check if the SIS is enabled, open regedit and check the existence of the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SIS

That’s it

In the next part, the installation of SCDPM 2007

Till then,

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager: Powershell script

2009-08-10T12:02:00Z

Hey All,

Another interesting Powershell script:

Allow DPM to backup itself:

Set-DPMGlobalProperty -DPMServerName <servername> -AllowLocalDataProtection $true

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Important Hotfix Rollup Package

2009-07-11T09:30:00Z

Hey All,

Microsoft has released a hotfix rollup package for SCDPM 2007 SP1. This package resolves a lot of issues with this product:

Issue 1
If you enable library sharing, you cannot delete a protection group, and you receive the following error message:

Cannot promote the transaction to a distributed transaction because there is an active save point in this transaction.

Issue 2
The SharePoint backup process fails if DPM 2007 cannot back up a content database. If you install this update, the SharePoint backup process will finish. However, an alert will be raised if DPM 2007 cannot back up a content database.

Issue 3
DPM 2007 jobs randomly fail. In the administrator console, you see error code 0x800706BA if you check the detailed information about the failed job.

Issue 4
DPM 2007 does not delete directories that are no longer being protected from the replica volume.

Issue 5
When you restore a Microsoft SharePoint site that is configured to use a host header, the incorrect SharePoint site is restored.

Issue 6
DPM 2007 performs a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) full backup. Because the transaction logs are deleted when the DPM 2007 backup job is completed, this backup may interfere with other applications that are backing up transactional applications such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange.
After you install this update rollup, you can configure DPM 2007 to perform VSS copy backup. This means that the application transaction logs will not be deleted when the DPM 2007 backup job is finished.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

To configure DPM 2007 to perform VSS copy backup, add the following CopyBackupEnabled registry value under the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent\2.0

Registry value: CopyBackupEnabled
Type: REG_DWORD
Value Data: 1

Issue 7
Reconciling a VSS shadow copy causes the DPM 2007 service to crash.

Issue 8
The DPM 2007 service crashes if a tape backup job is canceled during the CheckConcurrencyBlock operation.

Issue 9
The Pruneshadowcopies.ps1 script cannot delete expired recovery points.

Issue 10
If a parent backup job of a SharePoint farm fails, but the child backup succeeds, the DPM 2007 service crashes.
This hotfix also includes the following previously released rollups for Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1:

961502 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961502/ ) A replica may be listed as inconsistent after you install System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 on a computer that is running an x64-based version of Windows Server 2003

963102 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963102/ ) Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: February 16, 2009

968579 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968579/ ) Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: April 14, 2009

Make sure you install this one on all of your DPM installations:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;970867

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager SP1: How to start a DPM project

2009-07-02T01:43:00Z

// Note: For some reason, my tables are not shown. I'll try to fix this but I don't seem to be able to figure out why... Sorry about that.

As promised, here is a guidance on how to start a DPM project, based on the IPD Guides of Microsoft.

First thing to know is when you implement a DPM project (and this counts for about ALL of the System Center Suite) you need to know and understand exactly the business requirements. Without them, it is impossible to deliver a great implementation. With them, and understanding them, then the implementation will be quick, easy and your backup worries will decrease a lot.

Oke, here goes

First, I will give the Decision Flow according to the IPD

All these steps will now be discussed

Step 1: Project Scope

In this Step, you will need to collect all the information necessary for the implementation.

AD domain & Forest information

You start with the AD Domain and Forest information. The servers you need to protect need to be in the same domain or there have to be a two-way cross-domain or cross-forest trust between the domains where the protected servers will be located.

I normally use the following table to write down the information

Domain Name

FQDN

Netbiosname

Network Topology and Bandwidth

Make sure that you have an overview of the Network Topology and Bandwidth. It will be difficult to protect a server every 15 minutes if it is located on a WAN connection that has high latency or doesn’t always have connectivity. A drawing of the topology can be very handy when designing the solution.

Data Loss Tolerance

The business will need to give this input. What is tolerated in case of a disaster. This is the equivalent to the recovery point objective (RPO). This is necessary to determine the load on servers, storage and tapes. Don’t let the business tell you that there is no tolerance for data loss if they are not prepared to pay the price for the storage, servers and tapes. If there is not enough budget, then you can’t get it all…

Retention Range

Q from IT: How long must data be kept for availability?

A from business:…

Mostly it is important to verify if all services / data / … have the same retention range. From time to time it is not necessary to keep certain data for 6 months or longer. You should always ask the business whether they need a 3 month copy or if the last week is ok. The better you precise the question about the different applications, the better the answers will be and you will save storage and tapes that you can use for more important issues.

Q from IT: Are you under some regularity compliance? (HIPAA, SOX…)

A from business:…

If you are under compliance, the retention ranges and stuff are already defined for you. Read them and implement them. End of story.

Speed of data Recovery

This is similar to the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and will determine when disk is used or when tape is used. The quicker you need to be able to recover, the more disk you will use and vice versa.

End-User Recovery

Will end-users be able to recover their own deleted files without the intervention of IT? What’s the business requirement on this one?

BCP / DRP

Will this implementation be part of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or/and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). In other words, if it is part of the BCP, this means that you need to be able to recover crashed items asap. If it is only part of the DRP plan, then you need to have a good strategy to recover when things fail, but then it is not necessary to recover on the spot.

Future plans

Are there any business acquisitions or divestments planned in the near future? Will the DPM solution be used for this? Are there servers or applications that will be retired in the near future. Do we need to calculate a new application in the design?

Step 2: Determine What Data Will Be Protected

In this step, you will need to figure out what kind of data you will be protecting.

Virtual Machines

As you know, DPM can protect entire guest VM’s. Fill in the next tables to get an overview of all VM’s you need to protect (This includes Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 SP1 virtual machines)

Additional note: Pass-through disks are NOT protected with this method. You will need to backup that disk with an agent inside the VM.

Host	Host IP	Guest	Guest IP

Exchange Server

DPM can protect only mailbox servers. So no edge servers or other roles. Only the data is protected.

Additional information:

- Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007 Single Copy Cluster (SCC); DPM agent on all nodes in the cluster

- Exchange Server 2007 local continuous replication (LCR): Install the DPM agent on both the active and passive node

- Exchange Server 2007 cluster continuous replication (CCR): The DPM agent must be installed on both nodes in the cluster

- Exchange Server 2007 SP1 standby continuous replication (SCR): Install the DPM agent on the active node and standby nodes

Again, I use a simple table and fill in the data

Servername	OS	Server IP	Storage Group	Database

Sharepoint services

What are we going to protect here? Again my tables… :-)

Servername	OS	Server IP	Farmname	Site

This can be for Sharepoint Services 3.0, MOSS 2007 or Sharepoint portal server 2003.

Please note that when you protect a sharepoint farm or a sharepoint services site that you don’t need to backup that database separately afterwards. It will only cause you troubles.

Also note that for recovering your sharepoint sites, you will need a recovery server. So keep that in mind when you need to ask for more servers.

Volumes, folders and shares

No explanation necessary here I think, only remember that we are talking about windows server 2003 SP1 or later. No more windows server 2000!

Servername	IP	Name

System State

Things that are protected by the system state are listed in the following article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dpm/bb808714.aspx

Servername	OS	Server IP

Exclusions

Write down the exclusions here. This can be folder based, File based or File extension based. Maybe interesting if you don’t want to backup the entire companies MP3 collection ;-)

Think also about the following: If DFS-N is in place (Distributed File Share-Namespace) then map to the actual file locations, because shares through the DFS hierarchy cannot be selected for protection, only the target paths can be selected. If DFS-R (Replication) is used, the map to all the replicas and then select one of them for protection.

Servername	ServerIP	Excluded folder

Servername	ServerIP	Excluded files

Servername	Server IP	Excluded file extension

Step 3: Create Logical Design for Protection

In this step, the protection requirements will be translated into a logical design. And that logical design will be configured as one or more protection groups. But before you start, stop for a moment and consider the following VSS limitations

File protection to disk is limited to 64 shadow copies
File protection can have a maximum of 8 scheduled recovery points for each protection group each day
Application protection to disk is limited to 512 shadow copies, incremental backups are not counted towards this limit

Keep those in mind while designing this step

To do this, you will now need to fill in the next table so you can determine recovery goals, protection media and how the replica’s will be created.

Here is the explanation for the various parameters

Server or workstation: Name of the Server and if it is a server or a workstation
Location: Location of the data
Data to be protected: Application data or File data.
Data Size: Current size of the data
Rate of Change: How fast does the data change?
Protected volume: The name of the protected volume (if applicable)
Synchronization Frequency: How many times do we need to apply the changes to the replica
Retention Range: How long must this data be kept available (online and/or offline)
Recovery Point Schedule: How many time between RPs
Media: Which media is used? (disk or tape or disk/tape)
Replica Creation Method: Automatic or manual (backup/restore)?
Protection group name: Choose a name
DPM Server: Choose the correct DPM server. (If more then 1 server will be in place)

	SQL Production Databases
Server or workstation	SQL1, SQL2, SQL3
Location	Physical Location, eg Antwerp Office
Data to be Protected	Application
Data Source Type	Disk
Data Size	in total, 600 GB, calculated to 1 TB in five years
Rate of Change	Frequent
Protected Volume	SQL Store
Synchronization Frequency	15 min
Retention Range	7 days
Recovery Point Schedule	9.00, 12.00, 15.00, 18.00, 21.00
Media	Disk/Tape
Replica Creation method	Automatic
Protection Group name	SQL Production
DPM Server	DPM01

If you make this map for each of the data you need to backup, you already designed your protection groups.

Step 4: Design the Storage

Here’s the tricky part. It is almost impossible to correctly calculate how much storage you need. There are a few helpfull hands on the internet, but most of the time I have seen that taking the complete storage and make it two times that size is good enough. This is (of course) when you want to use the synchronization features at full. If you are only interested in the traditional way of backing up, then you can go with less.

Anyway, here are a few links for storage calculation

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795684.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb808859.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2007/10/31/data-protection-manager-2007-storage-calculator.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=445BC0CD-FC93-480D-98F0-3A5FB05D18D0&displaylang=en

Custom Volumes

Do we need to consider custom volumes? Only if:

Critical data must be manually separated onto a high performance LUN
To meet regulatory requirements
To separate IO-intensive workloads across multiple spindles

Choose the Disk Subsystem

If you have an option, decide what you are going to use as disk subsystem. Will you be using DAS, SAN, iSCSI? What RAID configuration? Choose this based on the Peak IOps during backup or restore but in my humble opinion, a good iSCSI solution will do the trick without any problems (Think Dell MD3000i for example…)

Tape Storage

What tapedrive model or robotic library will you be using? Is it compliant?

Check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dpm/cc678583.aspx for compliancy

Placement of Disk and Tape Storage

What is the location of the disk and tape storage towards the DPM server? Is it close? Is it network connected, fiber? scsi connected?

Step 5: Design the DPM Server

Finally you are getting to the end of this process. You can design the DPM server itself.

calculate how many DPM Servers are needed

These are the limitations of one DPM Server:

Maximum 250 storage groups
Maximum 10 Tb for 32-bit DPM servers
Maximum 45 TB for 64-bit DPM servers
Maximum 256 data sources per DPM server (64-bit) where each data source needs two volumes
Maximum 128 data sources per DPM server (32-bit)
Maximum 8000 VSS shadow copies
VSS Addressing limits: Add a DPM server for each 5 TB (32-bit) or 22 TB (64-bit)
Maximum 75 protected servers and 150 protected workstations per server
Data sources in another domain / forest that is untrusted… Add a new DPM server

Map protection groups to servers and storage.

Well, as already said, if more then one DPM is in place, map the table to the correct server. Few pointers here:

Separate data that cannot coexist on the same server for legal or compliance reasons
Group protection groups that have different synchronization frequencies
Group protection groups with the same media requirements
Group protection groups that comprise data sources that are within the same high-speed network.
Group protection groups that will be backed up from or to VM’s.

Hardware requirements

According to Microsoft:

What	Minimum	Recommended
Processor	1 Ghz	2.33 Ghz quad-core CPUs
Memory	2 GB	4 GB ram
Pagefile	0.2 % the size of all recovery points + 1.5 times the RAM	N/A
Disk Space	Program Files: 410 MB Database file drive: 900 MB System Drive: 2650 MB	2-3 GB free on the PF volume
Disk Space for Storage Pool	1.5 times the size of the protected data	2-3 times the size of the protected data
Logical Unit Number (LUN)	N/A	Maximum of 17 TB for GPT dynamic disks 2 TB for MBR disks

Software Requirements

You need to know these 5 things before deciding to place DPM on a server.

NO ia64-bit OS
NO Microsoft System Center Operations Manager on same server.
NO domain controller or application server
Windows Server 2008 (Standard & Enterprise Edition)
Windows Server 2003 with SP2 (R2)

Virtual or not?

Yes you can run DPM virtually when you use pass-through disks or iSCSI device. Please note that you can’t connect to a tape library directly attached to that server at that time.

Database

Please keep in mind that you need to run the DPM database on a separate SQL instance! You also need to plan for SSRS to be implemented on each DPM server. It is necessary, you can’t without.

Dedicated Network

Will you be using a dedicated network? If so, write it down.

Fault Tolerance and protection for DPM

Two components of DPM can be made fault tolerant: The DPM server and the DPM database. However, keep this in mind for fault tolerance:

Server cannot be run as an MSCS clustered application
Server can run in a VM, which can be a part of a clustered environment
Database is not supported in an MSCS cluster
DPM Server can backup its own databases to tape.
A DPM Server can be used to protect the data from other DPM Servers.

Oke, that’s it. Before you even started to do something, you have gathered all the information necessary to deploy a good DPM implementation.

It will lower the changes of failure and even (if necessary) point out to the management that additional resources are needed or that you can not deliver the asked business requirements

Cheers,

Mike

Normal 0 false 21 false false false NL-BE X-NONE X-NONE

SCDPM: How to change the System State Backup Location

2009-06-30T17:16:00Z

Hey All,

If you ever want to change the location where DPM places the backup of a System State, here it is. Why would you want to do that? One of the most heard reasons is because you want the backup on another drive for space reasons. Anyway, here’s how to:

To achieve this, you need to change the PSDataSourceConfig.xml on the protected server. This can be found on %program files%\dpm\datasources

Change the value between <FilesToProtect></FilesToProtect> to the correct value and save it (By default, this will be %systemdrive%\WindowsImageBackup\*)

After that, do the following things on the DPM server:

1) Run a consistency check (This will fail big time :-))

2) Modify the protected group by running through the wizard (next next till you drop and finish)

3) Run the consistency check again, and it should be solved

That’s it

With thanks to Steven for the information

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: How it works

2009-05-06T08:34:00Z

Hey All,

As promised, a post about how Data Protection Manager works.

First, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 supports three types of backup as shown in the picture.

1) Disk-to-disk (D2D)

2) Disk-to-tape (D2T)

3) Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T)

Many organizations suffer with the same problem. The size of the data is growing, and the backup window is getting smaller or is simply not big enough anymore to backup all the data necessary. And even the weekend becomes more problematic these days. Because of that, a lot of backup programs are working now with Disk to Disk backups. Why? Disk storage is getting cheaper, it is more reliable then tape, and the restore is much faster then from tape. SCDPM does this also.

Still, the end of the tape is still far away. Many organizations will keep tape backups to store them offsite in case of a disaster. So a backup to tape is still necessary. SCDPM supports this with the D2T, or better known as the ‘old school’ backup to tape, or in combination with the D2D, which makes it the D2D2T, the Disk to disk to tape backup.

First, how does it works. As an example, we will talk about the backup of a file server.

As you can see, I will backup a volume (D:) on a file server. The DPM server will have a replica of this volume.

After that, the DPM server will take snapshots on different times (that are adjustable by yourself) and he will base himself on changes of the filesystem. Only the changes will be replicated to the replica.

In the picture, you see that the DPM server will synchronize every 15 minutes. He will keep the data for 12 days and 5 times a day, a recovery point will be taken.

This is a screenshot for a user that can see the different versions of a file on a fileserver.

With this mechanism, you can actually give users the ability to restore their documents without intervention of an IT engineer. An administrator / IT Engineer can decide on a schedule when the DPM server will synchronize the newer versions with the replica residing on the DPM server. This process is called Continuous Data Protection (CDP).

Example of a real-life problem

DPM does not only have this mechanism for files, but also for a few key-applications within your environment such as Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint. As an example, I will discuss the exchange technology.

Just like it does with files, DPM will make a full replica of the Exchange databases. Then, depending on your settings, it will synchronize each x time (by default 15 minutes) a copy of the closed transaction logs to the DPM server.

First step: Full replica

Second step: Synchronization of the closed transaction logs

Minimal each 12 hours, there is a full express backup of the exchange replica. This will cause each change since the last full express backup to be applied to the replica. DPM uses a special filter that keeps track off the changes on byte-level, causing it to only transfer a minimum of content on the network.

The combination of the full express backup and the synchronization of the exchange logs gives an IT Engineer / Administrator the possibility to restore the full database and the transaction logs just before the problems arose or when the exchange serve went down.

Another (great) possibility is the option to create a disaster recovery with a secondary DPM server protecting the first one. If you can locate this second DPM server in another datacenter or in another location, you are creating a very good disaster recovery plan and then you have the possibility to quickly recover from problems or disaster.

One of the most important things in these scenario’s are the calculation of the storage necessary to support these technologies. But I will come back on that in my next post.

Although this all seems nice and many IT administrators / engineers will want this in their environment, one of the questions IT decision takers will ask is how difficult this is to work with. Will the IT staff need special education. Can they easily monitor the system? What about reporting? And how can I verify that everything is running as smoothly as it should. And maybe last but not least, how many work will this application give my IT staff on a daily basis?

The good news is, I can answer on all this questions very positive.

No special education is needed because the interface is based on the same gui as for example Outlook or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM).

Monitoring the system is easy if you have SCOM in place (dedicated Management Pack for this technology), and if not, you can always let the system sends emails each time there is a problem. And, as with every System Center product, when there is an alert, the application will always suggest possible solutions.

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Reporting is also no problem, there are a lot of predefined, usable reports in the system that can be mailed daily

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Also one of the major advantages of the system is that it will automatically do a consistency check after each “backup”. This will allow the IT staff to quickly find non-consistent data in the environment.

And last but not least, will this give the IT staff a lot of work? Honestly, no. DPM is not a product that requires a “baby sitter”. As long as everything is well-designed and implemented, your staff can read the daily reports, check for errors in SCOM or view the alerts in the console once a day (or through email) and the system will run on itself. Second, you will gain a lot of time each time a restore needs to be done because of the speed and easiness you can recover. Of course, you will need to invest a lot of time in the initial architecture / design and implementation of the system. How you can achieve this? Check out my next post on designing a DPM solution.

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: A good backup choice?

2009-04-07T12:48:00Z

ith the release of SP1 2 months ago, Microsoft has created a product that can actually take a huge amount of this market. So if you ever think that this product suits your environment, here are a few pointers to help you sell it to the upper-management.

Ok, now about the product.

First, why would you not choose for this solution.

If you only want one backup solution in your environment, and you’re not only running on windows, then stop thinking about this product.
If you have servers in a DMZ zone (workgroup) or in a domain that has not a full trust, the story also ends, unless you want to install multiple SCDPM servers

Only two reasons and end of story… This product must be fantastic ;-). Unfortunately, there aren’t too many environments that don’t have a DMZ zone, or that are running full windows. So these two items are really a killer to defend this to the management…

How you can solve this will be explained later on. First, we’ll start with what is new to DPM 2007 Service Pack 1.

Protection of Hyper-V machines, including 2008 Hyper-V and Hyper-V server. And since there is still the possibility to do a complete backup of Virtual Server 2005 R2 guests, the whole microsoft virtualization suite is covered. And we are really talking here about online backup of an entire guest! How cool is that…
SQL server protection now protects SQL 2008, and it gives you added protection capabilities for mirrored databases
Sharepoint Server 2007 and sharepoint services 3.0 receive index protection, catalog optimization and support for mirrored content databases.
Exchange Server 2007 SCR protection
Cross-forest Protection: It is possible to backup from other domains, but a forest level trust is necessary!

For more information about the product, make sure you check out the FAQ and the product page

If you want to use this product, you need to “sell” following advantages to your management:

Lower cost on licenses. Make sure you check out the video on edge (edge.technet.com/media/DPM-2007-sp1-licensing). Second, if you already have SMSE licenses, or if you are thinking about buying those, this product is included!
Fast restore. If you have enough storage (SAN, iSCSI…) you can create protection groups so that you can easily and quickly restore files, mailboxes, mails, databases, sharepoint items….)
You can backup to storage online for various products and afterwards back-up to tape without interference with the infrastructure. This means that the “backup-window” disappears and that you can do your backups to tape whenever you want.
Whether we like it or not, it is a Microsoft product, and the functionality for Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint are fantastic.
As already said, full host server based backups for Virtual machines.
Users can perform their own recoveries
Possibility of having one DPM server protect another, making it possible to have a backup server in another location to get up and running again very fast after disaster

Great reporting possibilities

I think these 8 lines are already a great start for building a business case towards the decision taker.

But now for the problems I mentioned in the beginning of this post.

DPM is not capable of backing up non-windows systems. So for that, you need another solution. Also a true san backup is also not possible. So what can we do about it?

In many cases, we implemented the following solution:

We implemented DPM to do backups on SAN space or iSCSI systems. After that, we used another solution (mostly HP Data Protector) to take a backup of that storage. The combination of both systems is perfectly possible as described on the following technet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795753.aspx

For the non-windows environments, the HP data protector is also a solution but you can of course go to Veritas or ArcServe or other solutions.

For the next release of DPM, I think Microsoft should think about the following features:

San backup
Backup of filesystems on non-windows environments (Hey, if they can monitor them through SCOM, why not backup them???)
Possibility of protecting servers that are not in the same domain or are in a workgroup / forest without full trust

Cheers,

Mike

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: Terminology

2009-04-07T12:02:00Z

In my next few posts, I will discuss three topics about DPM 2007 SP1.

A good backup choice? This will discuss how to “sell” this product to the IT decision takers and talks about the ROI of the product
How it works. This will discuss more how the product works in and what snapshotting is on a high level, not to technical.
How to start a DPM project. This will discuss (based on the IPD from Microsoft) what the best way is to prepare for a DPM project.

To understand the next few topics, I will give here a few definitions that are used in the product. (taken from the technet site)

RPO: RPO means Recovery Point Objective. This means the following: What is the amount of data that is tolerated to lose in case of a disaster. In many cases, the business will say no loss :-). But since that is almost impossible (unless you have sophisticated systems such as SAN replication etc…).

Retention Range: Basically, how long must data kept for availability. Most known example is the GFS principle which stands for Grandfather, Father, Son.

RTO: Recovery Time Objective. How fast do you need to be online again. Most of the time, IT decision takers need to find a balance between the RTO and the RPO which is a very difficult exercise.

End-User Recovery: Will the end-users be able to do recovery there selves without intervention of IT?

BCP / DRP: Business Continuity Plan / Disaster Recovery Plan. The first is about figuring out if the business can continue to run after a disaster and the second is more about recovering what is lost.

Data Source: The data that DPM considers as a unit for protection. DPM allocates separate storage for each data source.

Differential Backup: This term is not used with DPM. It refers to a backup in which all of the files that are new, or have changed since the last backup, are backed ip.

Express Full Backup: A type of backup that only transfers blocks that changed since the previous express full backup. This creates a recovery point.

Incremental backup (sync): A type of backup that uses the application’s native form of incremental data protection.

For example, for a server running SQL Server, it’s a log file backup; and for a server running Exchange Server, it’s a VSS incremental backup. Each incremental backup creates a new recovery point. With incremental backups, only the data that has changed since the most recent full or incremental backup are backed up, which means that the size of the incremental backup is usually much smaller than a full backup.

Replica: A full copy of a protected data source that reflects the result of the most recent DPM operation for that data source.

Replica Volume: A volume that holds the current copy of the protected data for a data source.

Synchronization: The process by which DPM transfers changes to protected data from the protected computer to the DPM server, and applies the changes to the replica of the protected volume.

Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS): Provides the backup infrastructure for the Windows XP, Windows Vista®, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, as well as a mechanism for creating consistent point-in-time copies of data known as shadow copies.

Protection Group: One or more data sources that are grouped together, to be protected in the same way, by the same DPM server.

Consistency Check: The process by which DPM checks for and corrects inconsistencies between a protected data source and its replica. A consistency check is performed only when normal mechanisms for recording changes to protected data, and for applying those changes to replicas, have been interrupted.

Recovery Point: The point in time view of a previous version of a data source that is available for recovery from media managed by DPM.

That’s it for now, next post: A good backup choice?

Cheers,

Mike

Installation of DPM 2007 Sp1 went fine but did require a consistency check

2009-01-29T22:05:00Z

This post is written by Ilse Van Criekinge from Pro-Exchange.be

Being anxious to get my hands on Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, I was very happy to see it is available for download now @ Microsoft. After reading the installation guidelines, I went ahead and updated my test environment.
Since I have one DPM server, and I'm running running the SQL DPMDB instance on the Data Protection Manager 2007 server itself, I only needed to download and run the DataProtectionManager2007-KB959605.exe on the DPM server.

After double-clicking the exe file, the installation of Visual C++ Redistributable is launched.

After finishing the installation of this Visual C++ redistributable, the setup of service pack 1 really kicks off:

Setup does warn you that any jobs in progress or the ones that will start during the installation process will fail. The installation procedure will also backup the DPM database. The warning that the process may take several hours can be ignored by me since I'm only using this DPM server to backup my Exchange environment.
I accept the License agreement:

And start the installation:

To finish the update process I will need to restart the DPM server, as stated clearly when the installation of Service Pack is done:

After rebooting the DPM Server, it is clear that I don't have any other choice than to update the agents on my protected Exchange servers as well.

DPM warns you that updating the agent may cause the need to schedule a consistency check after the upgrade:

And DPM shows that the agent status is now ok:

But a look at the protection group soon reveals that a consistency check is needed:

Which I manually initiated immediately:

And after a few minutes of waiting, everything worked out fine:

So, installation went fine (even though rebooting both the DPM server and the protected Exchange server was required), and I had to perform a consistency check after updating the agents, but everything looks good now :-) Time to test the protecting of a SCR target now, but that's for a next post ;-)
Please note, we have been forced to disable the ability to post comments, due to comment spammers. If you have a comment about this post or any other, don't hesitate to send me a mail @ ilse.vancriekinge[@]pro-exchange.be
- Ilse

This post is written by Ilse Van Criekinge from Pro-Exchange.be

IPD Guides: Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1

2009-01-08T21:37:14Z

Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides-Release Announcement: Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1

The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released a new guide, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.
Looking to protect your organization's data but not quite sure how to do this? This guide leads the reader through the process of planning a Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 SP1 infrastructure. Work through the infrastructure design process in a logical, sequential order. This guide enables the reader to quickly identify what types of data will be protected, what the recovery goals are, and the protection strategy to achieve those goals. Other benefits of using this guide include best practice design guidance from the product group and an optimized infrastructure to best meet the business requirements.

Download the guide

Grtz,

Alexandre Verkinderen

http://scug.be/blogs

Prerequisites and Known Issues with Hyper-V Protection

2008-12-20T09:17:00Z

SP1 for dataprotection 2007 is now available, but if there are some prerequisites and known issues with Hyper-V protection:

Prerequisites:

Before protecting Hyper-V virtual machines with DPM, ensure that the following updates are installed on the target Hyper-V server:

The customer should be running Hyper-V RTM. The corresponding Windows update is KB950050 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=132735). HyperV Manager version should be 6.0.6001.18016.

Install the following updates:

KB951308 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=132733) on each cluster node for cluster deployment.
Increased functionality and virtual machine control in the Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster Management console for the Hyper-V role.

KB959962 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=136583) on the Hyper-V host and the guest virtual machines. This update for Hyper-V writer is required for backing up Hyper-V VMs with DPM.

Note
KB959962 is scheduled to release in January 2009, it enables online protection of Hyper-V guest machines. Until the update is available, virtual machines can be protected by configuring them for offline backup within each machines’ Integration Components service settings. Open the Settings window for the virtual machine and select Integration Services in the left pane. Clear the check box for Backup (volume snapshot) service and click OK. If you have set the DWORD AllowOffline registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent make sure the value is not zero (0).

Note

KB959962 is scheduled to release in January 2009, it enables online protection of Hyper-V guest machines. Until the update is available, virtual machines can be protected by configuring them for offline backup within each machines’ Integration Components service settings. Open the Settings window for the virtual machine and select Integration Services in the left pane. Clear the check box for Backup (volume snapshot) service and click OK. If you have set the DWORD AllowOffline registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent make sure the value is not zero (0).

KB960038 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=136584) on all Hyper-V hosts. This update for Windows Server 2008 fixes a crash of the Hyper-V host server which you may experience when backups are made using Hyper-V writer.

The version of Integration Components running inside the VM should be the same as the version of Hyper-V on the host. For Hyper-V RTM it is 6.0.6001.18016.
You can confirm this in the Device Manager inside the guest VM. Under System Devices in Device Manager, right-click on the entry Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy and choose Properties. Check the version under the Driver tab. If the version does not match, insert the integration services disk by choosing the option under the Action menu in the VM console. Install the integration components and reboot the VM.

Known Issues:

Issue	Symptoms	Cause	Workaround	Solution	Recommendation
Hyper-V server stops working when DPM runs backups on the server.	You may experience a Stop 0x7E when you backup a server that has the Hyper-V role installed.	This is a problem in the volsnap.sys driver when interacting with the Hyper-V VSS writer.	N/A	Download and install KB960038 on the Hyper-V host to solve this problem.	We recommend that you deploy this in the next available downtime window on the Hyper-V host.
Backup of Hyper-V virtual machine fails	Hyper-V virtual machine backups (backups using child partition) fail with following error for multiple volume virtual machines: DPM encountered a retryable VSS error. (ID 30112 Details: Unknown error (0x800423f3) (0x800423F3)). On the Hyper-V host in the event log: VMMS Event log contains following entry: Failed to revert to VSS snapshot on one or more virtual hard disks of the virtual machine '%1'. (Virtual machine ID %2).	.	Perform an offline backup of the virtual machine.	Download and install KB959962 on the Hyper-V host to solve this problem.	We recommend that you install this update on all Hyper-V hosts protected by DPM.
Recovery of Hyper-V virtual machine fails	The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service stops when you are restoring a virtual machine.	This issue can occur if the virtual machine is configured to use a legacy network adapter.	Restart the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service.	Download and install KB959962 on the Hyper-V host to solve this problem. Then recover the data to an alternate location.	We recommend that you deploy this update on all Hyper-V hosts protected by DPM.
Backup of the Hyper-V virtual machine fails	Hyper-V VSS writer is in a bad state and does not identify itself to VSS anymore. The VSS application writer or the VSS provider is in a bad state. Either it was already in a bad state or it entered a bad state during the current operation (ID 30111 Details: Unknown error (0x80042319) (0x80042319)). Please check that the Event Service and the VSS service are running, and check for errors associated with these services in the Application Event Log on the server hyper01.contoso.com. Please allow 10 minutes for VSS to repair itself and then retry the operation.	This is a problem in the Hyper-V writer in Windows Server 2008.	To get the writer back to a stable state, restart the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service. Perform offline backups of the virtual machines to prevent the writer from going into a bad state.	Download and install KB959962 on the Hyper-V host to solve this problem.	We recommend that you deploy this update on all Hyper-V hosts protected by DPM.

Grtz,

Alexandre Verkinderen

http://scug.be/blogs

Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007 now available

2008-12-20T09:13:00Z

What’s new in SP1 for DataProtection Manager 2007:

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 provides continuous data protection for Windows application and file servers using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media and includes the following expanded capabilities:

Protection of Hyper-V™ virtualization platforms, including both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, has been added to the existing set of protected workloads, building on the virtualization protection originally delivered for Virtual Server 2005.
Enhanced SQL Server 2008 protection, including the addition of new protection capabilities for mirrored databases, support for parallel backups of databases within a single instance, and the ability to move data from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for migration scenarios.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 receive index protection, significant catalog optimization, and support for mirrored content databases.
Added protection for Exchange Server 2007 Standby Cluster Replication (SCR), enabling a complete disaster recovery solution that leverages SCR failover alongside DPM point-in-time restores.

In addition to enhancing the protection of each of the core Microsoft application workloads, additional capabilities have also been introduced with the release of DPM 2007 SP1, such as:

Local Data Source Protection enabling the DPM 2007 SP1 server to act as a branch office server offering self-protecting File Services and Virtualization hosting within one platform.
Cross-Forest Protection allowing large enterprise customers with multiple Active Directory® forests to now have even more flexibility in their DPM deployments.
Provision for a Client DPML answers customer demand for a more cost-effective way to protect Windows XP and Windows Vista clients using the same DPM 2007 infrastructure that protects their servers.
Disaster Recovery capabilities within DPM 2007 SP1 now include the ability to leverage a third-party vaulting partner via the cloud (SaaS).

DPM 2007 SP1 x86
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125991

DPM 2007 SP1 x64
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125992

Management pack for DPM 2007:

feature Bullet Summary:

Centrally monitor the health and state of data protection for multiple DPM servers and protected computers.
In State Views, view consolidated state for protection activities in DPM at a glance. For DPM servers, view the state of database and service health, performance, and other indicators. For protected computers, view the state of connectivity, data protection and recovery operations.
Monitor resource usage and performance trends on DPM servers.
Monitor actionable DPM alerts relating to protection and recovery.
Through MOM alerts, monitor the status of memory, CPU, and disk resources on DPM servers, and find out about database and service failures.
Read Product Knowledge to get comprehensive practical information for diagnosing and resolving alerts.
Use tasks to diagnose and resolve problems on remote DPM servers.

Download MP here

Grtz,

Alexandr Verkinderen

http://scug.be/blogs