All Full VM backups of the Sharepoint virtual machine failed with the following error:

DPM encountered a retryable VSS error. (ID 30112 Details: VssError: The writer experienced a transient error. If the backup process is retried, the error may not reoccur. (0x800423F3))

Running a synchronization job with consistency check gave the same error.
Backups of other VMs worked perfectly.

In the DPM log files on the Hyper-V host I only found the same error code as in the DPM alert.
In this case, the logs weren’t really helpful.

I logged on to the Sharepoint server, opened an elevated command prompt and ran:
vssadmin list writers

A lot of writers, both system and SharePoint writers, where in state Waiting for Completion.
Rebooting the server made the writers Stable. Until I retried the backup job.
All writers went to exactly the same state as before the reboot.

I opened event viewer and noticed a lot of SharePoint related errors.
One of the IT guys at the customer site had also told me the SharePoint search didn’t work.
Because SharePoint vss writers were also in a error state I decided to look closer into the SharePoint issues.

Alerts in event viewer looked like this:
The mount operation for the gatherer application 5bfe200c-6fbe-4eef-811f-487d7b875766 has failed because the schema version of the search administration database is less than the minimum backwards compatibility schema version supported for this gatherer application. The database might not have been upgraded.

This led me to the following blog post about SP1:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx

SP1 installation requires two steps! Running the update executable, which updates the binaries, and running an additional command which updates the database etc!

By running the following command in an elevated SharePoint PowerShell prompt I noticed the upgrade wasn’t executed correctly.
get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade

I completed the upgrade with the following command:
PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

Rebooted the server and retried my backup! It worked without any issues!

My Virtual Machine Backup failed because of an issue on Sharepoint application level!
Sharepoint issues were blocking VM backups. The sharepoint application backups were running fine the entire time.

I have said it before: it’s not always a DPM issue. A lot of people find it easy to blame DPM. 
But I have learned the most issues are because of issues on application level! 

Make sure your application runs fine when troubleshooting backup failures!

Most of my customer create one or more custom statuses like In Progress.

In Service Manager 2012, changing the status to In Progress requires many clicks.
The console tasks used to change the status of an Incident are grouped in a parent task called "Change Incident Status". When you want to update the status to In Progress, there are to many steps required: Change Incident Status –> Other –> Select the correct status –> Click OK.

To motivate analysts to always keep the incident status up to date, we searched for a way to update statuses with one single click.
This means we need to create tasks at the root level.

There is already a custom management pack available in the Technet Gallery to do this for the default statuses (Activate, Resolve,Close). Download & Import this management pack (http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Service-Manager-2012-b558f3ac).

Now, we only need to create console tasks for our custom status, in this case, In Progress.
First, we need to get the ElementId for this status.

Export & Open the Management Pack which contains your custom status (Default: Service Manager Incident Management Configuration Library).
Scroll down to the DisplayStrings section and search for the Display string with Name: In Progress.
Note down the value in ElementID, in this case InProgress.Enum (Note: when creating a status using the lists in Service Manager your elementID will look like enum.<GUID>, use this value)

Go to Library , Tasks and Start the Create Task wizard.

Task Name: In Progress
Description: Change the incident status to In Progress
Target Class: Incident
Management Pack: I used the same management pack as the one from the Technet Galleries,  you can create a new MP or use an existing.

Categories: Where will the task be displayed. I selected Incident Management Folder Tasks.

Full path to Command: powershell.exe
Parameters: cd ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\Service Manager\Powershell’;Import-Module .\System.Center.Service.Manager.psd1; $IncidentClass = Get-SCClass -Name System.workitem.incident;$Incident = Get-SCClassInstance -Class $IncidentClass -Filter ‘Id -eq $Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Id$’;If ($Incident.count -gt 0) { $Incident | Foreach-Object {$_.Status = ‘InProgress.Enum’;Update-SCClassInstance -Instance $_}; };
Log in action log when this task is run: Enabled
Show output when this task is run: Enabled.

Note: Update the InProgress.Enum to the value you found in the previous step.

The In Progress task is displayed in the incident management folder, and should be working.

But we still need to do some fine tuning to the task: Add an image and only show the task when an incident is selected.
There is no way to do this using the SCSM GUI, so we need to change the management pack XML code.

Export the management pack and open it in an xml editor.

Scroll down to the DisplayStrings section and find the DisplayString with In Progress in the <Name> Tag. Copy/Note down the ElementID.

Search for the <Categories> tag, and look for the <category> with the ElementID from the previous step as target.

Update the Value from: SMIncident!ServiceManager.IncidentManagement.IncidentManagementFolderTasks to SMConsole!Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.UI.Console.MultiSelectTask

Your category should look like this now:    <Category ID="Category_7112A19A5D9C497D8BEB78A9D23B2D9B65D92CC1" Target="ConsoleTask.c5d9d01115684a04a6ddfc646dd77c8d" Value="SMConsole!Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.UI.Console.MultiSelectTask" />

Now, search for the <ImageReferences> tag. (You can create the tag if it doesn’t exist)
And add an image reference for the in progress status:

<ImageReference ElementID="ConsoleTask.c5d9d01115684a04a6ddfc646dd77c8d" ImageID="SMIncident!IncidentMgmt_IncidentStatusChange_16" />

Note: Update to the ElementID in yellow to the ElementID you found in the previous step.

Update your Management Pack Version number and re-import the Management Pack.

The task is displayed correctly:

After importing & configuring the Exchange Connector 3.0 RTM at a customer it remained in a “Never Run” state.

In the Operations Manager log in event viewer I noticed the following events:

Event ID 33880

A Windows Workflow Foundation workflow failed during execution.
Workflow Type: Microsoft.SystemCenter.ExchangeConnector.ProcessEmailsWorkflow
Workflow Identifier: 26a9e5a1-185f-60f7-e83f-4d6bb49dc686
Exception Type: Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.UnauthorizedAccessEnterpriseManagementException
Exception Message: The user Domain\WorkflowAccount does not have sufficient permission to perform the operation.

Event ID 26319

An exception was thrown while processing ProcessDiscoveryData for session ID uuid:f22483af-6795-4aed-8470-eab0b72e23f0;id=597.
Exception message: The user Domain\WorkflowAccount does not have sufficient permission to perform the operation.

The Workflow Account always need to be a member of the Service Manager Administrator Role.
After adding the workflow account to the Administrator role, and waiting for a few minutes, the exchange connector started working.

One of my customer’s has multiple sites worldwide.
Some of these sites have their own Support Group. For these sites, support groups are created within Service Manager.

All users world wide can create requests on the portal.
But when a users in the US creates an Incident, the incident needs to be assigned to the US Support Group. The same needs to happen for users in Belgium, these users need to be added to the BE Support Group.

The support group only needs to be set automatically for Incidents created by the portal.
This is because an analyst in Belgium can solve a problem for a user in the USA.
We don’t want to update the support group to the USA when the analyst in Belgium created the problem using the console.

This blog post will explain how to do this using the SCSM Console.

To do this, we will use the “Office” AD property. Make sure the office is correctly filled in for each user IN Active Directory.

You can check a users location by going to Configuration Items – Users open a users properties and verify the Office field is set correctly.
In this example, the office is set to “Ferranti Houston”.

Create an Incident Template and only define the Support Group in the template.

Go to Administration – Workflows – Configuration – Incident Event Workflow Configuration
And create a new workflow.

Give the Workflow a Name, Description and select a Management Pack.
Set the parameter “Check for Events” to: When an object is created.

In the Event Criteria, select the Affected User class, and search for the Office property.
Add this property to the criteria, and set the criteria to contain your office name.
In this example the office name is “Ferranti Houston” so the property is set to Houston.

You can add multiple Offices to the criteria if you want to use the same support group for more offices.

Because we only want to apply this template for incidents created by the portal, we also need to add a criteria for this.
Select the Incident class, and add the source property to the criteria. Set the criteria to “equal Portal”.

In the Select Incident Template settings, apply the template created earlier.

You can send out a notification if you want to but it isn’t needed in this case.
Create the workflow. Follow the same steps for other regions.

Regards,

Valérie

One of my customers upgrade from DPM 2010 to DPM 2012.

The DPM worked without issues, but after a few weeks, they noticed the DPM database became really big.
In a few weeks the database had grown from 5 GB to more as 200 GB.

had an issue were the DPMDB became really large, bigger than 200GB.

The database kept growing and growing.

I asked the customer to execute a query on the DPMDB, to see which items are causing the database to become this large.

USE DPMDB
Go
declare @TableSpace table (TableName sysname, RowsK varchar(32), ReservedMB varchar(32), DataMB varchar(32), IndexSizeMB varchar(32), UnusedMB varchar(32))
insert @TableSpace
exec sp_MSforeachtable @command1=”exec sp_spaceused ‘?’;”
update @TableSpace set RowsK = CONVERT(varchar, 1+convert(int, RowsK)/1024)
update @TableSpace set ReservedMB = CONVERT(varchar, 1+convert(int,LEFT(ReservedMB, charindex(‘ K’, ReservedMB,-1)))/1024)
update @TableSpace set DataMB = CONVERT(varchar, 1+convert(int,LEFT(DataMB, charindex(‘ K’, DataMB,-1)))/1024)
update @TableSpace set IndexSizeMB = CONVERT(varchar, convert(int,LEFT(IndexSizeMB, charindex(‘ K’, IndexSizeMB,-1)))/1024)
update @TableSpace set UnusedMB = CONVERT(varchar, convert(int,LEFT(UnusedMB, charindex(‘ K’, UnusedMB,-1)))/1024)
select * from @TableSpace order by convert(int,ReservedMB) desc
go

The query output looked like this:

From this query, it was obvious Sharepoint was the problem.
We also noticed the database started growing really fast when the sharepoint catalog task was running.

The customer opened a case at Microsoft for this issue.
Microsoft identified this as a problem after the CU 3 installation.

The following steps are provided as a solution.
The line that is now commented out in the SQL query in yellow is what is causing the problem.

1. Backup the DPM Database (dpmbackup –db) or use SQL to make a backup.

2.  Paste the SQL Query below and execute it, it will update the DPM Stored procedure causing the problem.

1.       Backup the DPM Database (dpmbackup –db) or use SQL to make a backup.     

2.       Paste the SQL Query below and execute it, it will update the DPM Stored procedure causing the problem.

USE[DPMDB]

GO

/****** Object:  StoredProcedure [dbo].[prc_PRM_SharePointRecoverableObject_Update]    Script Date: 11/03/2012 01:36:08 ******/

SET ANSI_NULLS ON

GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON

GO

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[prc_PRM_SharePointRecoverableObject_Update]

(

    @Caption                        nvarchar(40),

    @ComponentType                  nvarchar(16),

    @RecoverableObjectId            BIGINT

)

AS

    DECLARE @error INT,

            @rowCount INT

    SET @error = 0

    SET NOCOUNT ON

    – UPDATE tbl_RM_SharePointRecoverableObject SET Caption = @Caption        

    UPDATE tbl_RM_SharePointRecoverableObject SET Caption = @Caption,

                ComponentType = @ComponentType        

    WHERE RecoverableObjectId = @RecoverableObjectId

    SELECT @error = dbo.udf_DPS_CheckRowCount(1)

    SET NOCOUNT OFF

    RETURN @error

3.       Start a new SharePoint Catalog Task – it should run and not cause the DB growth issue.

A big thank you to Bart D. for sending me the solution form the Microsoft call !

I created a basic Automatic Approval in Config Manager 2012.
This rule approves all critical and security alerts for windows client OS.

Running this rule gives an error with Error code 0×87020417.

When looking into the Application Event Log, the following event with id 8706 is displayed:

On 20/11/2012 16:57:00, component SMS_RULE_ENGINE on computer SCCMSERVER reported: Content download failed.
Message: failed to download one or more content files.
Source: SMS Rule Engine

When opening the ruleengine.log in the CMTrace utility, the following error was shown.

Failed to download the update from internet. Error=407
Failed to download ContentID 16778381 forr UpdateID 16779081. Error code = 407

This error is related to the proxy. But the SCCM server, which is also running the WSUS role, was excluded from the proxy.

I openend Internet Explorer with my user account, opened Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings.
The option Automatically detect settings was enabled! Is disabled this option but this didn’t change anything!

Config Manager was still using the proxy to download the updates.

But I realised config manager wasn’t using MY account to download the updates.
So, I decided to run Internet Explorer as Local System.

To do this, download the PSTools from SysInternals.
Open an administrative command prompt and browse to the PStools directory.

Execute the following command to open an command prompt as local system:

psexec –I –s C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe

A new Internet Explorer window opens. Disable the auto detect settings in this Internet Explorer window.

Run the rule again, the updates should download now!

Valérie

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Currently the System Center 2012 stack isn’t supported yet on Server 2012.
That’s why Microsoft is working really hard on a SP1 for the SC 2012 products.

A few days ago the CTP 2 for System Center 2012 SP1 was publicly released.

All links to the announcements and downloads are below:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager
http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2012/06/15/announcing-the-availability-of-system-center-2012-ctp2-virtual-machine-manager.aspx

System Center Operations Manager
http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/06/15/announcing-the-availability-of-system-center-2012-ctp2-operations-manager.aspx

System Center Data Protection Manager
http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2012/06/15/announcing-the-availability-of-system-center-2012-ctp2-data-protection-manager.aspx

System Center Service Manager
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/06/15/announcing-the-availability-of-system-center-2012-sp1-community-technology-preview-2.aspx

System Center Orchestrator
http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/archive/2012/06/15/announcing-the-availability-of-system-center-2012-sp1-community-technology-preview-2.aspx

Valérie