SCDPM Online Articles

DPM & Certificates

David Allen — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:15:00 GMT

Hi All,

The good folks at Microsoft have recently put out a three post series on DPM certificate troubleshooting, which I thought I would share. Certificates seem to be a common cause of problems, so this series of posts should help many of you.

DPM Certificate Troubleshotting:

Part 1: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2012/07/23/dpm-certificate-troubleshooting-part-1-general-troubleshooting.aspx

Part 2: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2012/07/24/dpm-certificate-troubleshooting-part-2-registry.aspx

Part 3: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2012/07/25/dpm-certificate-troubleshooting-part-3-certificates.aspx

If you use certificates with DPM, I highly recommend this reading.

Enjoy.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Windows Server 8 Beta-managing it with ConfigMgr 2012 RC (#SCCM) and backing it up with DPM 2012 RC (#SCDPM)

David Allen — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:10:00 GMT

This post is courtesy of Cameron Fuller (http://www.systemcentercentral.com/Default.aspx?tabid=143&IndexId=92048)

I recently blogged on installing Windows Server 8 Beta as a guest operating system in my SCVMM environment, and attempting to monitor Windows Server 8 Beta with Operations Manager 2012 RC. The next logical step was to investigate backing up Windows Server 8 Beta with Data Protection Manager 2012 RC and managing it with Configuration Manager 2012. Results are listed below with screenshots of the steps required:

[Images are not uploading correctly for this blog post - please see http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2012/03/02/windows-server-8-beta-managing-it-with-configmgr-2012-rc-sccm-and-backing-it-up-with-dpm-2012-rc-scdpm.aspx for the full blog post with images included]

Data Protection Manager 2012 RC & Windows Server 8 Beta:

An attempt to deploy the agent directly from the DPM 2012 RC failed but I've seen that happen before on some other agent deployment.

I logged into the Windows Server 8 Beta system, and ran the X64 installer from a remote share.

After the installer completed, I had to attach the agent to DPM but it was not communicating correctly after the attempt to attach (results shown below).

On the Windows Server 8 Beta system I next had to use the setdpmserver program to point this server to the appropriate DPM server (setdpmserver -dpmservername <fqdn of the dpm server>) as shown below:

Once it was approved it started working as expected/shown below with updated unprotected status and the results of adding it to a protection group.

DPM result: For Windows Server Beta 8 and DPM 2012 RC we were able to install the agent but the DPM server cannot communicate with it.

Configuration Manager 2012 RC & Windows Server 8 Beta:

To test Windows Server 8 Beta and Configuration Manager, I deployed the Configuration Manager client by pushing it from the Configuration Manager console. I did end up having to start a Configuration Manager service (SMS Host I believe?) but that may have just been due to my own impatience. Below are the screenshots showing the Configuration Manager properties.

And the applications installed on Windows Server 8 Beta displayed the Configuration Manager 2012 Software Center program:

Even EndPoint protection appears to have deployed correctly as shown below!

Configuration Manager result: The agent installation appears to work like a champ!

Thank you to David Allen for his assistance with the DPM configuration and for Lukasz Rutkowski for his thoughts on this topic!

Summary: Initial tests of using Data Protection Manager 2012 RC to backup Windows Server 8 Beta and Configuration Manager 2012 RC to manage Windows Server 8 Beta look pretty positive at least from an agent deployment perspective!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2012 Central Console

David Allen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:30:00 GMT

With the Beta release of DPM 2012, there is a new installation option for a DPM Central Console. This is very exciting as finally it is now possible to mange multiple DPM servers from one location, and what is also great is that the new central console utilises System Center Operations Manager as the management platform!!

The steps below outline how to install the server side and client side components to enable the DPM central console. The server side components need to be installed first on the Operations Manager server before the client components can work. The DPM management pack will also need importing into Operations Manager so the central administration tasks can be launched.

Installing the Server Side Components

From the DPM 2012 Beta installation media, run "setup.exe" on the Operations Manager server.
Select DPM Central Console from the installation splash screen.
The setup wizard will open on a welcome screen, click Next.
Select Install Central Console Server side Components, and click Next.
Set the installation location for the program files, click Next.
Select whether or not to use Microsoft Update, click Install.
Wait for the installation to complete, and click Close.
That's it, that's the server side components installed

Installing the Client Side Components

Before installing the client side components, confirm the server side components have been installed.
Select DPM Central Console from the installation splash screen, as shown in the server side components installation steps above.
The setup wizard will open on a welcome screen, click Next.
Select Install Central Console Client side Components, and click Next.
Set the installation location for the program files, click Next.
Select whether or not to use Microsoft Update, click Install.
Wait for the installation to complete, and click Close.
That's it, that's the client side components installed

Importing the DPM Management Pack

As DPM uses Operations Manager as the central console platform, you must import the management pack to discover, monitor and remotely administer your DPM servers.

The management packs are located at <installdrive>\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\Management Packs on the Operations Manager server where the server side components were installed. The management pack files are named:

Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataProtectionManager.2011.Discovery
Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataProtectionManager.2011.Library.mp

The management pack files have 2011 in the name, which is strange as there was no 2011 version of DPM, but I'm sure this will be rectified at RTM.

The management packs can be imported in the usual way.. Open the SCOM console, select Administration from the wundabar, and then select Management Packs. Then click Import Management Pack from the Actions menu, and select the management packs listed above.

Once the management packs are imported, your DPM servers will be discovered and monitored. After the DPM servers have been discovered, you will then be able to remotely manage them!!!

Remotely Administering DPM

Now all the components have been installed, and the management packs imported, you can now start remotely administering DPM. To do this, open the Operations Manager console, and expand the Data Protection Manager 2012 folder from within the Monitoring view. Then select the DPM Servers view, where your DPM servers should be listed.

When you highlight a DPM server a list of tasks will appear in Actions, these include all the actions that were included with the DPM 2010 management pack, plus a brand new task. This new task is Manage DPM server and it will launch a remote administration console for the DPM server... which is awesome!!!

For any organization this is going to be hugely helpful, as there is no longer a need to remote desktop to a DPM server to administer it. I think everyone who uses DPM is going to be hugely excited by this, I know I am

Enjoy!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Installing DPM 2012 Beta

David Allen — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:25:00 GMT

With DPM2012 Beta recently becoming publicly available, I thought I would share my installation experiences. There are few components to DPM2012 that can be installed, but in this post I wil focus on installing just the DPM server.

After downloading the media, run "setup.exe" from the DPM2012_BETA_FullBuild folder.

When the spash screen opens, click Data Protection Manager under the Install heading. Usually I would suggest running the pre-requisite checker first, however this does not work in this Beta build.

As usual with MS products, the screen you'll be presented with is the Microsoft Software License Terms window. Accept the terms and conditions and click Next.

The pre-requisite installations will now occur, this includes Visual C++ 2008, .NET Framework and other files required for installation.

After the setup applications and files have been installed, the DPM Setup Wizard will launch. On the Welcome screen, click Next.

Select whether to use a dedicated instance of SQL, which the DPM installer will install, or an existing istance of SQL, and then click Check and Install. The DPM installer will then check whether all the prerequisites are met, and install and configure the prerequisites where necessary.

Where the prerequisistes are not met and further actions are required, this will be reported back in the wizard. In most cases SISFilter will probably not be installed; this will be installed by the DPM installer however a reboot will be required.

After rebooting, if necessary, and restarting the installer the installtion of DPM can continue. When reaching the prerequisites check screen again, click Check and Install to confirm that all the prerequisites are met. If they are, you will be presented with the screen below. Click Next.

Enter the relevant product information, and click Next.

Choose where to install the DPM program files and database files, and click Next.

Specifiy a password for the local accounts the DPM requires, and click Next.

Select whether or not to use Microsoft Update, and click Next.

Select whether or not to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program, and click Next. Note: I would recommend selecting this option as Microsoft will receive a lot of information about DPM and how it is used, which is used to further improve the product.

On the Summary screen, confirm everything is correct and then click Install.

DPM will now install. If you selected to use a dedicated instance of SQL, SQL Server 2008 R2 will also be installed.

When installation completes, you should receive nice green check marks against each item installed, and the Status field should advise that the installation was successful. If installation was successful, click Close.

Now there will be a icon on your desktop to launch Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2012. Double click the shortcut to launch DPM and view the nice new console :-)

And that's it... As with previous DPM versions, the install is very simple and straight forward!

Look out for more upcoming posts on installing other DPM components, the new console, and other new features and improvements.

Good luck!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 MP - Data Discovery Timeout

David Allen — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:30:00 GMT

Further to my previous post on the DPM 2010 management pack, http://www.scdpmonline.org/dpm-2010-management-pack.aspx, I have noticed another configuration issue that I would urge you to override.

Within the DPM2010 MP is a discovery rule that discovers DPM data after the DPM server itself has been discovered. This discovery rule runs a VBS script to collect the data and by default it has a timeout value of 3 hours!!!! This is way too long!!!!

Most of the time the discovery script runs very quickly and if it doesn't, there is a problem on the DPM server. I would recommend overriding the timeout value to something more sensible like 5 minutes; if the script doesn't run in 5 minutes there is a problem that needs fixing and leaving the script running for up to 3 hours is not going to help.

Thanks for reading.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Client Protection Warning

David Allen — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:00:00 GMT

One of the new features introduced in DPM 2010 was client protection. This is a really nice feature that enables your desktop and laptop computers to be protected. Client protection works in a very similar way to server protection where one full backup is taken and changes are tracked using the VSS service which makes it very efficient when performing backups.

What I particularly like about client protection though is it's administration as you can allow the end-user to determine what they want to back-up or you can control centrally what is backed up.

The one issue with DPM client backup is that clients can be disconnected for long periods of time, and when that happens DPM can remove all data that has ever been backed up from this client. As with server protection, you can specify a retention range for how long the data is kept for. A server though is always connected (well, should be) so it has constant backups and five days worth of backups can always be taken and always be available. A client, like a laptop however, can be disconnected for long periods of time and if it is disconnected for longer than the retention range, DPM will remove all the backups.

In most cases this isn't an issue as the DPM client will keep backups locally and then backup to the server when it is eventually connected. In the scenario though where a client computer suffers a complete failure and a backup to the server has not occurred with the retention range of the previous server backup, there is no data on the DPM server to be restored. Same applies if the client computer gets stolen; there will be no data to restore if no backup to the DPM server was made within the retention range of the last backup.

So, to summarize, if you have a retention range of 5 days for client protection, it is important to stress the importance of connecting to the corporate network at least once every 5 days so a DPM server backup can be taken. If no backup to the DPM server is made within the 5 days, there will be no data on the DPM server to restore is needed.

Any questions, please ask.

Happy data protecting.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Management Pack

David Allen — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:45:00 GMT

The Microsoft DPM 2010 management pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 was released a couple of months ago now and itt is available on this download page, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=32077d99-618f-43d0-843d-4ba4f8019f84. It is also now available on the web service catalogue.

So what's new and improved in this MP? Well, there have been a number of significant improvements that have been detailed by Jonathan Almquist at http://blogs.technet.com/b/jonathanalmquist/archive/2010/10/21/data-protection-manager-2010-management-pack-just-released-things-you-need-to-know.aspx.

There is also a summary of all the new features on the download page which I have pasted below, just for you.

Other improvements I have noticed are:

The number of object properties discovered has been significantly decreased. In larger environments this will prevent significant performance issues on the RMS and database.
The number of object properties discovering dynamic data has also been significantly reduced. Although the number of discovered object properties has been reduced, the biggest cause of data churn with this MP was that is was discovering dynamic data. This has also been significantly reduced with data on volume sizes and total recovery points no longer being collected as a data source object property.
Three new state views. There are now new state views for Datasource State (Hyper-V), Datasource State (Secondary) and Protected Computer State (Secondary).
The default discovery interval has been increased. This again was a needed change. One of the first things you noticed with the previous MP was that the data discovery ran every two hours and this in turn a high level of configuration churn. The data discovery is now every 12 hours.
Updated images. The DPM server images in the MP have been updated and look better. This is only a cosmetic improvement but I think cosmetic improvements are always welcome.
SLA-based, Standard or Ticketing System. This MP is the first to offer monitoring options for Standard monitoring, SLA monitoring and monitoring for use with a ticketing system. This is really nice and shows that the authors of this MP have thought about the different ways in which monitoring is performed in different companies. I will not go over the details here as Jonathan Almquist has done a very good write-up in the blog post mentioned above.
More monitors. There are now many more monitors in this new MP which means you can now truly use Operations Manager to accurately monitor you DPM servers.
Consolidation, correlation and suppression. This MP has consolidation, correlation and suppression implemented in many of its workflows. This is really useful as it does not mean you will necessarily get an alert for every Error or Warning event posted to the DPM Alerts log. Again though, this has been detailed by Jonathan in his blog so I wont go through it again here.
Documentation. Not much to say here other than the documentation is very good and seems to be constantly improved.

Now for the not so positive side, here are the issues I have with the MP:

A number of the views do not have the State column enabled by default. Although this is relatively minor as you only need to right click in the State View and select Personalize View to enable the viewing of the state column, I think the State column is one of the most important columns in a state view!!!
Views do noy have friendly names. This isn't a viewable issue unless you look at the MP at an authoring level but it is a big frustration of mine. The majority of views in this MP have nice friendly names which you see in the console, but break open the MP and the real view names have the horrible "View_hahie883r4...." names so you can't tell which view is which. This occurs when views are created in the Operations Manager console and saved to the MP rather than created in the XML or authoring console; it would have been nice if these had been created properly.
Still using Events in DPM Alerts Log . The DPM management pack provides monitoring by monitoring the DPM Alerts event log. When Alert Publishing has been enabled on a DPM server, event log messages will start getting posted to the DPM Alerts log whenever there is a failure/alert and when a failure/alert has been resolved. The monitors in the DPM management pack are based on these log entries and the state of the monitored data sources change based on these monitors. I personally am not a fan of this type of monitoring, I would much rather perform some kind of data query to accurately return the state of what is being monitored. The problem with monitors looking at event logs is that if an event isn't posted to log or a event is missed by the monitor, the state of the monitor will not accurately reflect the state of what is being monitored.
Dynamic data is still discovered for disk objects. Although the number of object properties discovering dynamic data has been significantly reduced in this MP, there is one exception. The disk objects still have properties that collect dynamic data such as Used Space, Unallocated Space, % Allocated and % Unallocated. This data will change all the time so will have to be updated on every discovery which increases data churn; this is bad! To put this in some context though, if you have a small number of storage pool disks in a small number of DPM servers, you probably wont notice any performance issues as the amount of object property data that will need updating will still be relatively small. If however, you have a larger deployment with a lot of storage pool disks, the amount of object property data that will need updating is significantly larger and will cause more noticeable performance impacts. I do understand that this data is needed in the MP, but using a performance collection rule would be a better way of collecting this data.
No Reports. This is a real shame. As Operations Manager can monitor all your DPM servers centrally, it would be great to have some cool DPM availability, performance and SLA reports!

Overall this MP is a significant step forward and should definitely be implemented. The improvements in this MP by far out way the negative points that I mentioned above, and I hope that future DPM MP upgrades are as good as this one!

I'm sure I have missed a few things but hopefully I have covered all the major points and this has proved helpful to you. And, if you have any feedback on this MP please feel free to post a comment below.

Happy monitoring.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Hotfix Rollup Package - KB2250444

David Allen — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:13:00 GMT

Hi All,

A rollup hotfix package has been released for DPM 2010 that addresses a number of issues that many customers were experiencing. This KB is available for download now.

Detailed Information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2250444

Download Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f399fbfa-5c8b-4eb6-bda2-ea997745919a&displaylang=en

Here is a list of the issues that the hotfix rollup package will resolve:

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

As always, please test the hotfix in your non-production environment before applying to live production. Also, please remember to have a full backup of your DPM DB before applying.

Happy installing!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Monitoring DPM using OpsMgr, Cookdown & PowerShell

David Allen — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:15:00 GMT

Hello Again,

A query I often here is, "how can I accurately monitor DPM?", and this is actually more difficult than it sounds. If you only have one DPM server, it is quite easy to monitor the state of your backups directly but if you have hundreds of protected data sources across multiple DPM servers, you'll one one central place to monitor them. The logical place to perform this monitoring is in Operations Manager, especially as there is a DPM management pack for monitoring DPM, however there are a couple problems with this.

1. The Microsoft DPM management pack monitors the state of a data source based on event logs. In my opinion, this is not the best way to monitor a protected data source as I have noticed many occasions where the state of the data source in DPM does not match the state on Operations Manager.

2. There is no reports included with the current MS DPM management pack. And even if there were, they potentially would not be accurate as the state of the data sources is not being accurately tracked (point 1).

To address issue 1, I developed a monitor in Operations Manager that utilizes PowerShell to accurately track the state of DPM data sources. Now, normally this would not be recommended as traditionally you would target the monitor at the data source class, which would be very bad, as the PowerShell monitoring script would run once for each data source. This would mean that if you had 100 data sources on a DPM server, the script would run 100 times at every monitoring interval which could be as often as every 10-15 minutes. To get round this problem I have utilized cookdown in my monitor which basically means I can run a PowerShell script once at every monitoring interval and return the state of all the data sources on a DPM server. The monitor is configured to run every 15 minutes by default as protection can be configured as regular as every 15 minutes on some data sources.

I have found the solution to work very well as there is very little impact on the DPM server and you always have a true reflection of the state of your data source in Operations Manager. If accurate reporting on data source state from OpsMgr is important to you, I would also disable the deafult event log monitors in the MS DPM management pack. Although these monitors can tell you what specifically is wrong with a data source, they can also be mis-informative and inaccurate. In my experience, having extremely accurate but slightly less detailed monitoring is far better than more detailed but inaccurate monitoring. Although my monitor will not tell you why a data source is in a critical state, at least you can be sure it actually is in a critical state and needs to be troubleshooted.

You can download the management pack that contains the cookdown PowerShell monitor from the Management Packs folder on the Downloads page, http://www.scdpmonline.org/downloads.aspx; it is named SCDPMOnline.DataSourceMonitoring.xml.zip. As an added bonus, I have also included a DPM availability report.

If you just want to view and download the full script, click here. http://www.scdpmonline.org/DPM-Monitoring-Script-For-OpsMgr.aspx

To address issue 2, I developed status reports for DPM data sources. Visit my "Centralise DPM Availabilty Reporting" artcile here, http://www.scdpmonline.org/centralise-dpm-availability-reporting.aspx, for more details. This report is also included in MP above.

For more information on cookdown in OpsMgr, check out this article. http://www.systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/21670/Default.aspx

Enjoy!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Centralise DPM Availability Reporting

David Allen — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:20:00 GMT

We all know that one of the biggest frustrations of DPM is that each DPM server has to be managed individually as there is no central console. This also includes reporting and this can be an even bigger frustration as if you have more than one DPM server, you can’t get a single report displaying the status of the protection being provided for a given period.

Although this single report isn’t available in DPM, it is possible to create it in Operations Manager. If you have Operations Manager in your environment and you are using the DPM management pack to monitor and manage your DPM servers and data sources, then you have the availability information you need for a central status report. As Operations Manager monitors the state of the DPM data sources, irrelevant of what DPM server they are on, this state data can be used in an availability report to display the protection status of each and every data source.

What’s crazy about this is how easy it is to do. In Operations Manager you are provided with a generic report library and within this library there is a generic availability report, all you simply need to do is run this report and target it at the DPM data sources that you want to report on. Here is a step-by-step walk through.

1. Open the Operations Manager console and select Reporting from the wonder-bar.

2. Select the Microsoft Generic Report Library, select the Availability Report and the click Open in the Actions menu.

3. When the report opens, simply select the time range that you want to run the report for and select the data source objects that you want to report and click Run.

4. You now have your status report!

5. The report you just generated will show you Downtime and Uptime as both a percentage and as time. Uptime is where protection was being provided with no issues and Downtime is where there was a problem with protecting the data.

This is very useful information but if you have downtime you may want to know when that downtime was for a given data source. Simply click the Availability Tracker link for the data source you want more detailed information on and a new report will be generated showing you a day by day breakdown. You can then select a specific day to get an hour by hour breakdown of the data source status.

Central DPM data source report, done !!!

If you followed my steps above though, you may have noticed that finding the data source objects to run the report on can be very difficult as all OpsMgr objects are available to select. To make this easier for you I have packaged the report into a management pack and added an object filter so that only the data source objects will be displayed.

Download the Management Pack from the Management Pack directory on the Downloads page (registration required) and import into OpsMgr. You will then be able to access the report from the Reporting pane or from a link in the Actions menu when viewing the data source state view.

And when selecting the objects to report on, the search list is filtered to only display data sources.

Hope this makes your reporting a bit easier and a bit more useful for you!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

5 New DPM Data Sheets

David Allen — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:40:00 GMT

Hi All,

Jason Buffington has posted five new DPM 2010 data sheets on his All Backed Up blog, http://blogs.technet.com/b/jbuff/archive/2010/06/21/dpm-2010-datasheets.aspx.

These data sheets cover how to protect SQL, Exchange, SharePoint and Clients as well as providing a DPM 2010 overview. I recommend you take a look!

Product Overview of DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft SQL Server with DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft Exchange with DPM 2010

How to Protect Microsoft SharePoint with DPM 2010

How to Protect Windows Clients with DPM 2010

Enjoy.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM vNext Requirements - Have Your Say!

David Allen — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:50:00 GMT

DPM 2010 was only released earlier this month but the product team are already looking at the next version. They are currently scoping what should go into the next version of the DPM and they want to know what you want!

Follow the link below and complete the survey.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2010/06/18/dpm-what-s-next-let-your-voice-be-heard.aspx

This is your chance to be heard, so take the opportunity.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Management Pack Beta Available

David Allen — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:40:00 GMT

The DPM 2010 management pack beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 is now available on Microsoft Connect for download. I am in the process of reviewing this management pack so I will post more details soon. I will also be collecting feedback for the product team so if you have any feedback on this MP, please let me know.

This management pack has a different name from the current DPM 2007 MP so it will import along side the existing MP and will not update it.

Download the MP from here, http://connect.microsoft.com/site840/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=29486.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

i365 Join System Center Alliance

David Allen — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:30:00 GMT

At MMS this year, i365 announced that they are releasing an appliance that combines EVault with System Center Data Protection Manager. This appliance will provide the functionality to protect heterogeneous platforms and extend DPM into the cloud. This close relationship between i365 and Microsoft has resulted in i365 joining the System Center Alliance which is a network of System Center technology providers.

View the i365 site for more information, http://www.i365.com.

Click here for more information on i365 joining the System Center Alliance, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/i365-a-seagate-company-joins-microsoft-system-center-alliance-2010-06-14?reflink=MW_news_stmp.

I will be publishing more information on the i365 product here very soon.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Calculating Data Churn

David Allen — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Ever wanted to know how much data your DPM servers are churning? Perhaps you are looking to implement DPM2DPM4DR and want to know how much data you'll be transferring across you WAN, or perhaps you are investigating what storage to purchase and need this data to make an informed assessment. Well this is how you calculate your churn, it's easy to do but a bit time consuming as it's not possible to export data from the Jobs view.

Open the DPM console, select the Monitoring pane and the Jobs tab.
Click Create Filter from the Actions pane.
Give your new filter a name and select a 24 hour period.
Within the Filter options field, select the Jobs tab and place a check in the following job types and select all the job status's.
- Consistency check
- Replica creation
- Synchronization
Select the Protection tab and make select Group by Protection Group from the drop down menu and select All. If you have a check placed next to External tape jobs, remove it.
Select the Other tab and un-check any libraries that are selected.
Click OK to create the filter.
Select the new filter from the Filter names drop down menu and order the results by the Data Transferred column.
Now simply add up all the data transferred values to get your data churn rate per day. In my case I have the grand total data churn of 0.26MB as you can see in the image above.

In my example I have deliberately created only four jobs so it's easy to view. In your production environment though you could hundreds of jobs so adding up the data transferred values can take some time. If I work out a way to make this simpler, I'll be sure to let you know.

Hopefully that will be helpful to you.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Mistake in the DPM 2010 Upgrade Advisor

David Allen — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:20:00 GMT

I was using the DPM 2010 Upgrade Advisor to get the recommended steps for upgrading DPM servers that share a tape library when I noticed a small, but important, mistake.

If you use the upgrade advisor to provide the upgrade steps for a DPM Library Master server, step 1 looks like this.

Remove Library sharing on library client using the following instructions:
- On each library client run the following commands on an elevated command prompt:
- SetSharedDPMDatabase.exe -removedatabasesharing
- AddLibraryServerForDPM.exe -dpmserverwithlibrary <FQDN of Tape library server>

All these steps are fine apart from the third bullet which should have the -remove switch on the end. The full AddLibraryServerForDPM command should look like this.

AddLibraryServerForDPM.exe -dpmserverwithlibrary <FQDN of Tape library server> -remove

This is important as without the remove switch, you will not be removing library sharing on the library client.

Apart from this mistake, the DPM 2010 Upgrade Advisor is very good and I strongly recommend reviewing it before commencing your DPM 2010 upgrade. You can download it here, http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/F/3/FF3347F5-C076-400C-A77A-B6FFA0EA56A4/DPM%20Upgrade%20Advisor.xls.

Good luck with your upgrades!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

Remote Desktop Connection Manager

David Allen — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:30:00 GMT

I recently found that Microsoft released a product called Remote Desktop Connection Manager at the end of May. If you have a number of DPM servers to administer this tool could be very useful to you as you can only access the DPM console on the DPM server.

What's good about this, and other products like it, is that it stores all the connection details for all your servers so connecting and logging into servers is much quicker and simpler. It also allows you to create nested groups so you can organize all you server connections to best suit your needs.

Another feature I also like is that you can set login credentials at a group level and all connections in that group can inherit those credentials. This is great as it means I don't have to enter my user name and password over and over again and it means I only have to update my password in one location when it has been changed.

You can get Remote Desktop Connection Manager here, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047&displaylang=en.

Another product to also consider is RoyalTS from code4ward which you can get here, http://www.code4ward.net/main/. I have been using RoyalTS for some time now and haven't got a bad word to say about it, it does what it says on the tin and has 100% stable. The one great feature I use in this product is Duplicate, this allows you to duplicate an existing server connection which is so useful and a massive time saver.

I'll now let you make your decision!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Hardware Requirements

David Allen — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:15:00 GMT

I was recently reviewing the hardware recommendations for DPM2010 on TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399280.aspx, to make sure there are no radical changes . Whilst reviewing I noticed that the minimum page file requirement is greater than the recommended page file size.

Component	Minimum Requirement	Recommended Requirement
Page File	0.2 percent of the combined size of all recovery point volumes, in addition to the recommended size (generally, 1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer).	1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer.

Having a page file that is 0.2% of the combined size of all the recovery point volumes in addition to the recommended page file size is very important for VSS because if VSS runs out of available paged memory, the result could be the loss of shadow copies. As the page file size is very important, I thought I would confirm with the Microsoft DPM product team whether the hardware recommendation on TechNet was correct or not. As expected, they confirmed that having 0.2% of the combined size of all the recovery point volumes in addition to the recommended page file size is definitely recommended, however you could get away with a page file size that is just 1.5 times the amount of RAM as an absolute minimum.

An example of calculating your page file size:

	Size	Calculation	Recommended Size
System RAM	8GB	x 1.5	12GB
Combined Recovery Point Volumes	5TB	0.2%	10GB
Total Page File Size: 22GB

So until the hardware requirements page is updated, the minimum and recommended requirements for the page file are the wrong way round; here's how it should be.

Component	Minimum Requirement	Recommended Requirement
Page File	1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer.	0.2 percent of the combined size of all recovery point volumes, in addition to the recommended size (generally, 1.5 times the amount of RAM on the computer).

Hopefully that clarifies what the recommendation is and why the page file size is important in DPM.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Pre-Requisite Patches

David Allen — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:35:00 GMT

The newly released version of Data Protection Manager is only supported on Server 2008 x64 or Server 2008 R2; if you are deploying on Server 2008 x64 you need to make sure you have these three patches installed before you install DPM2010.

After installing the patches, reboot the server and you'll be good to go!

If you are planning on deploying DPM2010 on Server 2008 R2 then you are lucky, and at time of writing this you do not need to install any patches. You can go straight ahead and install DPM.

Obviously I recommend that you have the latest security and critical OS hot fix's installed before doing anything, the above patches are just specific ones you'll need to install DPM2010.

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...

DPM 2010 Upgrade Advisor

David Allen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:40:00 GMT

Jason Buffington, Senior Product Manager for DPM, has announced the release of the DPM upgrade advisor. Here is the post with all the details, http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/archive/2010/04/29/now-available-dpm-upgrade-advisor.aspx.

Jason also answers some of the most common asked questions as well, like "when will the full DPM2010 product be available?" and "when will it be available on TechNet and MSDN?". However, the most common question I have seen asked is "will I be able to upgrade from the DPM2010 eval to the full product?", and this question is answered in the upgrade advisor. The answer is.. YES !

So if you were unsure, the upgrade advisor provides all the steps you need to perform to upgrade from the eval to the full version. It also provides how to upgrade from DPM 2007 RTM to any newer version of DPM up to DPM 2010 RTM Retail, so it's well worth having.

Link to the upgrade advisor: http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/F/3/FF3347F5-C076-400C-A77A-B6FFA0EA56A4/DPM%20Upgrade%20Advisor.xls

Enjoy your upgrading!

David Allen

MVP System Center Operations Manager

http://www.scdpmonline.org

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb

David ...