Update Rollup 8 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

Hi folks,

DPM Update Rollup 8 has been released! 
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3086084

Unfortunately there is no new features but something worth mention is the following information:

"Note If the DPM server and protected servers are running DPM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 5 (version 4.2.1292.0) or earlier update rollups, the Agent update will require a restart of protected servers."

So what does this mean? Well, are you running UR6 and UR7 DPM-agents in your enviroment. There is no need for restart when you update them to UR8!

Below is the Issues that are fixed in this update rollup:

• The DPM Agent crashes intermittently during a backup.
• If you are trying to recover data from an imported tape, DPM may crash with a "Connection to the DPM service has been lost" error.
• If you try to back up a SharePoint site that uses SQL Always On as a content database, SQL logs are not truncated as expected.
• You cannot verify tape library compatibility for tapes that use RSMCompatmode settings such as IBM 35xx, 2900, and so on.
• If you have multiple SharePoint farms hosted on the same SQL cluster with different instances but the same database names, DPM cannot back up the correct SharePoint farm content.
• If you run Update Rollup 7 for Data Protection Manager 2012 R2, and you have already configured online protection for one or more protection groups, trying to change the protection group populates the default DPM settings for the "Select long-term goals" wizard instead of the previous configured values.
• When you try to protect a SQL failover cluster, the Data Protection Manager UI crashes for every backup or synchronization operation.
• If you install Update Rollup 7 for Data Protection Manager 2012 R2, self-service recovery for SQL databases may not work, and you receive the following error message:
  
  

Kind Regards

Markus Eliasson

Event ID 10028: DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer...

Hi,

A small post regarding my solution to a problem I encountered today.

Issue:

Backup-jobs have been failing and your DPM-agent is listed as unavalible.

In the Event Viewer on your DPM-server event id 10028 is logged in the System log:

DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer contoso-app01.contoso.local using any of the configured protocols; requested by PID a24 (C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\DPM\DPM\bin\msdpm.exe

The first thing you would troubleshoot is if there are any firewalls that are blocking the communication but for my case I knew nothing had change in the communication.

Resolution

1. Open up an elevated command promt and run ipconfig /flushdns.

2. Refresh your agent on the Management-tab in your DPM-console.

3. Re-run any failed DPM-jobs.

A very simple solution in my case to get the jobs working again but there is still some work to find out if there is an issue in the DNS registration in Active Directory.

Take care!

//Markus

Restart VSS-writers manually without server reboot

Hi,

Have you ever experienced problem with snapshot-backup due to failed VSS-writers and you cannot restart your server until after business hour or the next service window?

An alternative solution other than restarting the server is to restart each of the associated services for each of the VSS writers!

Find failed VSS-writers and restart service:

• Find each of the VSS writers in a failed state by issuing this command in an elevated command prompt - vssadmin list writers.
• Make a list of all the failed VSS writers or take a screenshot.
• Find the VSS writer's associated Service Display Name in the table below and restart the service.
• Issue the command again to confirm the status has changed Stable with no Error - vssadmin list writers.
• Attempt to perform another snapshot.
• If the VSS writers fail again, it will be necessary to restart the server.

VSS Writer	Service Name	Service Display Name
ASR Writer	VSS	Volume Shadow Copy
BITS Writer	BITS	Background Intelligent Transfer Service
COM+ REGDB Writer	VSS	Volume Shadow Copy
DFS Replication service writer	DFSR	DFS Replication
DHCP Jet Writer	DHCPServer	DHCP Server
FRS Writer	NtFrs	File Replication
FSRM writer	srmsvc	File Server Resource Manager
IIS Config Writer	AppHostSvc	Application Host Helper Service
IIS Metabase Writer	IISADMIN	IIS Admin Service
Microsoft Exchange Writer	MSExchangeIS	Microsoft Exchange Information Store
Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer	vmms	Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management
NTDS	NTDS	Active Directory Domain Services
OSearch VSS Writer	OSearch	Office SharePoint Server Search
OSearch14 VSS Writer	OSearch14	SharePoint Server Search 14
Registry Writer	VSS	Volume Shadow Copy
Shadow Copy Optimization Writer	VSS	Volume Shadow Copy
SPSearch VSS Writer	SPSearch	Windows SharePoint Services Search
SPSearch4 VSS Writer	SPSearch4	SharePoint Foundation Search V4
SqlServerWriter	SQLWriter	SQL Server VSS Writer
System Writer	CryptSvc	Cryptographic Services
TermServLicensing	TermServLicensing	Remote Desktop Licensing
WINS Jet Writer	WINS	Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
WMI Writer	Winmgmt	Windows Management Instrumentation

Kind Regards
Markus Eliasson

The replica is inconsistent with the protected data source (ID30111)

Hi,

Today I ran into a virtual machine which after months of successful jobs started to fail while trying to protect it with via Online Snapshot.

ID 30111

The event logs on the Hyper-V host for the virtual machine did not give me any additional information so I logged onto the virtual machine itself and ran VSSADMIN List Writers and it showed almost all VSS-writers in a "[10] Failed" state with the error "Timed Out".

I restarted all failed VSS-writers but as soon as I restarted the backup-job, the VSS-writers timed out again. The application event log on the virtual machine had the following errors: 

• Event ID 17 "Could not find a matching original volume for shadow volume \\?\Volume{GUID}"

• Event ID 12293: "Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Error calling a routine on a Shadow Copy Provider {74600e39-7dc5-4567-a03b-f091d6c7b092}. Routine details PreFinalCommitSnapshots({a2709227-7262-48ab-987b-5dc13bac4ab9}, 1) [hr = 0x80070490, Element not found.].
  Operation: Executing Asynchronous Operation.
  Context: Current State: DoSnapshotSet.

Resolution

As Event ID 17 was referring to a volume, I opened up an elevated PowerShell-window and ran Diskpart followed by List disk.

From the output, I could see was that one of my volumes were in an Offline state:

Disk 0 Online 60 GB 0 B *
  Disk 1 Offline 20GB 1024KB
  Disk 2 Online 100GB 0 B

I opened up Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc), right-clicked disk 2 and made it Online.

Without further actions, I tried to perform a consistency check on the virtual machine from the DPM-console and the job completed successfully.

Kind Regards

Markus Eliasson