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Archive for the ‘Data Protection Manager’ Category

I recently had the task of backing up Exchange 2007 using DPM 2007. I added the DPM agent to the Exchange server just fine. When I modified the protection group to add my storage groups I got an error saying I needed the eseutil.exe and ese.dll on the DPM server. I got these off my Exchange server and copied them to the DPM bin folder (C:\program files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin\). This took care of that error. You can also create a hard link to eseutil.exe and ese.dll. For more on this see: Exchange Server Database Utilities  & DPM07. 

After I got past that error I then ran into other errors on my Exchange protection members in DPM.

• “DPM has detected a discontinuity in the log chain“

and

• “Error 30216: DPM has detected a discontinuity in the log chain for Storage group First Storage Group on SERVERNAME.fqdn since the last synchronization.
  Error details: Unspecified error (0×80004005)

To resolve this I turned circular logging off on my Exchange storage groups and restarted the Exchange Information Store service. I then performed a consistency check on each of my storage group protection members and all errors went away.

• For further help backing up Exchange with DPM 2007 visit: Troubleshooting Exchange Server Protection Issues
• Here a blog on restoring Exchange using DPM: DPM 2007: Recovering Exchange data

So you have your 2008 servers systemstate backed up by DPM 2007. Your server crashes and you need to recover. DPM 2007 does not give an option to recover to the server only to tape or a network share.

What do you from here? The answer is you have to actually restore the system state using Microsoft’s built in windows backup utility. There is another catch it has to be done via command line using WBADMIN. Here are the steps to recover a server using Windows 2008 Backup from the command line: Read the rest of this entry »

In DPM 2007 I kept getting  “Replica is inconsistent” “Recovery point creation failed” errors on some of my protected members. You can see further details of the errors below and suggested solutions.

Here are some steps I tried to resolve the issue.

1 Right click on the protected member with the error and perform a consistency check. (Did not work)

2 Checked the storage pool on my DPM server under management>>disks

as you can see there is plenty of free space.

Read the rest of this entry »

I ran into problems installing DPM agent on a few of my servers over the network through the DPM admin console. In this case I had to manually install the DPM agent on the servers I wanted to protect. Here are the 4 steps:

1. Locate the 2.0.5820.0 folder on your DPM server here in:

%systemroot%\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Agents\RA\

The 2.0.5820.0 folder is here and will have folders i386 and amd64 in it. If you are installing on a 64bit server use the installer from the amd64 folder otherwise just use the i386 folder.

2. Copy to this folder to the local %systemroot% drive on the server you want to protect. I created a folder in on the server I wanted to protect to make things easy called DPMagentinstall
for example c:\DPMagentinstall

3. Open a command prompt. If this is Windows 2008 server be sure to open the command prompt with elevated privileges. Then type: CD c:\DPMagentinstall\DpmAgentInstaller.exe YOURDPMserverFQDN

EXAMPLE: DPMAgentInstaller.exe DPM01.mydomain.com

It will then let you know that your server requires a restart if it was successful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Data Protection Manger does not support external hard drives. You’re choices are to backup to disk and copy to external later, backup to SAN/DAS, or backup to tape drive.

From a Technet DPM FAQ:

Storage Pool Configuration
What types of storage can I use with DPM 2007?

DPM 2007 supports use of any of the following sources for server storage:
* Direct attached storage (DAS).
* Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN)
* Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage device or SAN, providing that the iSCSI storage device has received Windows Hardware Certification.

For many small businesses a tape library or a SAN solution is out of the IT budget.The need is still exists for an off site backup. There are two options to get around this and they are:

1. There is a utility that allows you to configure an external hard drive as a tape drive. This makes DPM think the external hard drive is a tape drive. This application is called Firestreamer. Firestreamer creates a Virtual Tape Library from your external hard drives. You can download a 3 month trial of this utility here: http://www.cristalink.com

2. You can go with external e-Sata drives. DPM will not know the difference between an internal sata drive and an external e-sata drive.

NOTE: Microsoft does not support backing up to external USB drives using DPM. I am not sure if they support backing up to external e-Sata drives.

I ran across this very useful set of Powershell scripts for DPM 07 on Technet. These scripts can help you do things you can’t do via the GUI. Here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/dpm/default.mspx?mfr=true and more will be added later but here are the scripts they have currently up there:

I needed to pull some reports on our backup in Data Protection Manager. So I clicked on Reporting in Data Protection manager and it threw an error like this:

“DPM could not connect to SQL Server Reporting Services server because of IIS

connectivity issues.

On the computer on which the DPM database was created, restart the World

Wide Web Publishing Service. On the Administrative Tools menu, select

Services. Right-click World Wide Web Publishing Service, and then click Start.”

Apparently there is a permission requirement in IIS 7 for ISAPI extensions that use a wildcard script. DPM uses this.

So you have to go into IIS 7 and set the permission for script to resolve this. Here are the steps:

Open up Server Manager expand Roles, expand Web Server (IIS).

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