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Archive for the ‘Data Protection Manager’ Category

Setting up anonymous SMTP in DPM has been an issue for some time. Anonymous SMTP notifications don’t work even if you have your Exchange server setup correctly to receive anonymous email from DPM. Let’s step through configuring this. Here are the steps to setup SMTP in DPM that does not require authentication:

1. In DPM Administrator Console, on the Action menu, click Options.

2. In the Options dialog box, on the SMTP Server tab, type the SMTP server name, the SMTP server port, and the e-mail address you want to display in the From box of the e-mail messages that DPM sends.

The e-mail address in the From box must be a valid e-mail address on the SMTP server.

3. To test the SMTP server settings, click Send Test E-mail, type the e-mail address to where you want DPM to send the test message, and then click OK.

If you leave the Username and Password name fields blank under “Authenticated SMTP Server” you will experience one of the following errors:

ID: 518

 

Details: An Authentication error occurred when trying to connect to the SMTP server.

You typed an incorrect user name, password, or SMTP server name. Type the correct user name and password to enable e-mail delivery of reports and alerts notifications.

 

After entering the information in all fields, sending a test message should succeed and you should then be able to receive e-mail reports and notifications if configured.

or

ID: 2013

 

Details: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password

 

DPM 2010 requires ALL the fields under the SMTP Server options to be filled in regardless if your SMTP server accepts anonymous connections or not.

The first thing to ensure is that “Allow Anonymous Relay on a Receive Connector” for your DPM server is setup on Exchange. Here is a link on how to configure this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232021.aspx

Ok now that we know the email server is set we need to configure some settings on the DPM server to get around these errors. The errors are a known issue and hopefully a fix will be released for this in the future. There are currently two work-arounds for the issue. These are:

1. In the registry on your DPM server, browse to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Notification\. Delete the SMTPPassword and SMTPUserName keys.

2. Create a local user account on the DPM server and give this user local administrative privileges. Enter the Username and Password of the user that you just setup under SMTP options in DPM.

That’s it now anonymous SMTP for DPM should work.

I have seen some questions regarding SIS that is installed with DPM. After doing some investigating and talking with Microsoft and some of the DPM MVP’s I can offer some clarification.

The SIS-Limited that is installed on a DPM server is actually a SIS Filter driver. The SIS Filter driver is what runs on DPM. You will not be able to manage the scaled down SIS like you can with full blown SIS. For example with the full blown SIS you can administer SIS using a command line tool named Sisadmin.exe. Well with SIS-Limited this tool does not exist.

DPM enables the filter driver so it can properly handle SIS files on a protected server. For example you may have SIS running on an Exchange server and DPM will know how to handle the SIS data properly when protecting it by using the SIS filter driver. DPM does not use SIS to conserve space in the storage pool when running SIS-Limited, so there is no de-dup by SIS on your DPM storage pool in this setup.

However there is a way to run a full SIS deployment on DPM, this is by installing DPM on top of Windows Storage Server. If you install DPM on a Windows Storage Server you’ll be able to use SIS for all data you store in your storage pool.

Here is the only article/documentation on installing DPM on Windows Storage Server:

http://www.itexpertmag.com/server/turn-dpm-and-windows-storage-server-into-an-appliance

Links regarding DPM supported on Windows Storage Server:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmsetup/thread/c2cf58c9-970a-45b2-bbe7-b096669f94e5/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399021.aspx (Below in Community Content)

Here is a nice step by step guide by Sean O Farrell on How to use Hardware VSS Writers with DPM 2010.

https://skydrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=525D35B4254479E8&resid=525D35B4254479E8!161

Sean’s blog: http://seanofarrelll.blogspot.com

Thanks for this guide Sean.

I needed to add a new server for protection to DPM. I went to install the agent on the server and it failed. I then went and attached the agent and then went to do a manual install of the agent on the server itself. When I got to the point of running SetDpmServer I got an error. This is the error I got:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin>SetDpmServer.exe -dpm
ServerName DPM.DOMAIN.com
Configuring dpm server settings and firewall settings for dpm server =[DPM.DOMAIN.com]
Configuring dpm server settings and firewall settings for dpm server =[DPM.DOMAIN.com]
SetDpmServer failed with errorcode =0×80004005, error says: Unspecified error
To further troubleshoot failures with SetDpmServer, go to  http://go.microsoft.c
om/fwlink/?LinkId=169142″

This error is not very helpful. This is what I did to fix it.

From an elevated command prompt stop the Windows firewall service by running:

• Net stop mpssvc

go ahead and run again

• SetDpmServer.exe -dpmServerName DPM.DOMAIN.com

start the Windows firewall again by running

• Net start mpssvc

You should be able to go back to the DPM admin console and see that your protected servers agent is “OK” now. This should work on DPM 07,10, and 2012.

Yes the title of this post is misleading. That was intentional. I have seen many fellow IT Pros in the community asking if backing up system state of Windows clients is possible with DPM 2010. Well it is not and it will not be possible with DPM 2012 either. DPM was designed to protect client data but not the machine entirely. DPM does a great job of protecting client data but there is a real need in some environments to protect client PC’s as a whole.

There is not an officially supported solution for this but there is a work around to protect the entire client.

For XP clients you could backup system state of your XP machines to a network share or folder and then have DPM pick it up from there.

Windows Vista/7 does not have a system state backup option. That was replaced with “Complete PC Back up”. Complete PC Back up in Windows Vista/7 is an image of the computer so it achieves a similar goal to system state. You can schedule to run the Complete PC Back up out to a folder or network share and then let DPM pick it up from there.

Again this is not ideal but it is a good alternative when you need complete protection of your client.

Here is the process to set this up on Windows 7.

• Go to Start>>>Control Panel>>>Backup and Restore

Note that Windows backup has not been setup yet.

• Click on Set up backup.

The Windows Backup wizard will start. This can take a while to open so be patient here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello DPM Community,

This is Steve here. I recently published a book on DPM 2010. I have been fortunate to team up with Microsoft DPM MVP’s Robert Hedblom and Islam Gomaa to write a DPM 2012 book. We are in the planning stages for this book. We would like to know from the community what specific topics would you like to see covered in this book? Post your responses here in the comments.

Thank You for your feedback.

Reporting for DPM has been a problem for many DPM administrators. You need better reporting on scheduled backup jobs, success/failures of backup jobs, details on tape jobs, SLA reports, and more. Your only other option was to create custom reports in DPM using the SQL views that come with DPM. I posted on how to do this a while back here:
http://www.buchatech.com/2011/01/building-custom-reports-in-dpm/.

Working with SQL views is not the easiest way to get custom reports if you are new to or not savvy with SQL Reporting services. Well the alternative to this is Prism.

A company named Bocada has developed a product called Prism that helps you get better reporting out of your backup solutions. They have a flavor for DPM. The nice folks at Bocada gave me a demo of this product live in action. Thanks Ralph!

I am going to give you some more details about Prism for DPM in this post.

There are many pros to Prism and only a couple of cons. One of the cons is that you still cannot bring the custom reports into the DPM console. They are however web based and easy enough to access. 
There still is a slight learning curve to learn how to customize reports.

Prism is a stand alone product that is deployed on a server and accessed via a web browser. It runs on top of IIS and accesses the DPM data directly through the DPM SQL database. Once Prism has collected information about DPM it is able to present the information as reports.

Prism can be setup to gather information from multiple DPM servers for reporting therefore it can be used in enterprises with many DPM servers.

Brocada  teamed up with Microsoft to create two default DPM specific reports in conjunction with reporting DPM related data in Prism. These reports are:

• Recovery Point Summary
  Recovery Point Summary provides a summary of the number of Non-expired recovery points, Date of the last non-expired recovery point and the average recovery point in Range for all the clients being protected. 

• Recovery Point Status
  Recovery Point Status lets you see the various success or failures of your daily recovery points. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Ruud Baars (Rest In Peace) of Microsoft hosted a DPM setting export/import tool on his skydrive called DPM-save-create-Config.

This tool contains 2 PowerShell scripts called DPMsaveConfig and DPMcreateConfig that could be used to save your DPM settings to an .xml file and then import the settings in from that .xml file. The link is here:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=b03306b628ab886f&sc=documents&id=B03306B628AB886F%21859

When you run DPMsaveConfig it creates a DPMsaveConfig.XML in %systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin.

Then when you run DPMcreateConfig it will automatically search for the DPMsaveConfig.XML and import the DPM settings from here.

The beauty of this tool is that it was created in PowerShell so you can go in and modify the scripts if you need to.

You can also download a copy of this tool directly from my blog here: DPM-save-create-Config

THE NEED:

In DPM you may run into scenarios where you are backing up a folder or a volume and there are folders or sub-folders that you actually don’t need  or want to protect. There is a way to “exclude” these from the backup. Before we talk about how to do this lets look at an example of why you would want to do this.

THE EXAMPLE:

Lets say you have a Windows cluster and you are backing up the c volume on one of your nodes in the cluster. This cluster is a Hyper-V cluster and you are protecting the virtual machines in your cluster directly. The C:\ClusterStorage folder on the c volume is where your .VHD’s and other virtual machine data is stored. You do not want to backup this folder because the virtual machines are being protected directly by DPM but you want to continue protecting everything else on the c volume. This is where  being able to exclude the C:\ClusterStorage folder comes into play.

THE SOLUTION:

Here is how you can exclude something from being backed up by DPM. There is a registry key on Windows servers called “FilesNotToBackup”. This key needs to be modified on the protected server with the data you want to exclude from the backup. It is that simple. Now here is how you do this.

Make a registry entry to the FilesNotToBackup list in the registry on the protected server you want to exclude data on.                         DPM/VSS will honor the FileNotToBackup list.

The path is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup add a Multi-String (REG_MULTI_SZ) value and place something like: C:\ClusterStorage (or any data you want to exclude from backup) in the Value Data field.

The next time the data is protected it should skip the C:\ClusterStorage (or any data you have selected to exclude from backup).

DPM’s data protection is facilitated by the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Therefore VSS is the secret sauce. VSS is in OS’s and Microsoft applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Hyper-V have their own VSS writers. Yes this may be old news as the VSS technology  has been around for some time but many IT Professionals still do not have a good understanding of VSS itself.

It is important for anyone working with DPM and even many other backup products out there to get a good understanding of VSS to know how the data protection is working underneath the hood. Microsoft has some  really good sites that explain VSS well. As a data protection protection pro it is important to go through these and become familiar with how VSS works:

• Basic VSS Concepts

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa381504%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

• Common Volume Backup Issues

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa381508%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

• Troubleshooting VSS Applications

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384626%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

• Volume Shadow Copy Glossary

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384647%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

• Volume Shadow Copy Service Overview

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee923636%28WS.10%29.aspx