Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager is now available!

Hi!

Update Rollup 9 has been released and for all the DPM-admin out there. Here is the fix we all have been waiting for:

• No production server restart is required when you upgrade from DPM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 6 or later versions!

"We have performed an extensive review of the DPM architecture to avoid production server restarts when you upgrade the DPM Agent. There were a few cases in which the Agent update was flagging for restart, and these are fixed now. Therefore, if you already upgraded to DPM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 6 or a later version, you will not experience a restart when you upgrade to this update."

There are more features and a lot of fixes that prevent issues in UR9 so go ahead and start upgrading: Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

Have a great Friday and a lovely weekend!

Kind Regards
Markus Eliasson

Setdpmserver, errorcode = 0x80070005, error says: access is denied

Hi,

So today I ran into an interesting problem when installing a DPM-agent on a Domain Controller in another trusted-domain.

The agent-installation completed successfully but when I ran:
   SetDpmserver.exe -dpmservername MyDPMServer.Bucatech.com
In a elevated command prompt I got received the error
   SetDpmServer failed with errorcode = 0x80070005, error says: Access is denied.

My solution, after some hours of troubleshooting, was to run a Enter-PsSession to the production server, from the DPM-server in my Bucatech.com-domain:

   Enter-PSSession ProdServer.Contoso.com -Credential Contoso\DomainAdminUser

*fill in my password in the authentication-box*

   CD 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin'

   .\SetDPMServer.exe -dpmservername MyDPMServer.Bucatech.com

I hope this can help anyone of you!

Kind Regards
Markus Eliasson

What's coming for System Center in 2016?

Hi everyone,

Just a quick post to update you on what new features we can expect to see in DPM 2016:

• Protect mixed mode clusters
• New form of change tracking to replace VSS snapshot-based backups - Resilient Change Tracking (RCT)
• Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) support
• Virtual TPM support for protection of Shielded VMs

How these new features will integrate with VMM 2016 and its new "VM Checkpoint support" ("Production" checkpoints in Server 2016) is going to be very interesting!

Here is a great bloggpost covering all System Center products:

What's coming for System Center in 2016?

Best Regards

Markus Eliasson

Microsoft recommends installing Update Rollup 8 to improve stability

Hi everyone!

Its now 2016 and we have got a whole new year of exciting new features and releases in front of us, but lets focus on our current situation for a moment.

Update Rollup 8 for DPM 2012 R2 has been out almost two months now and if you haven't already upgraded now is the time. Microsoft has received good feedback from thousands of customers and have decided to make the UR8 marked as "Important Update" on Microsoft Update. 

Here is a complete list of important issues that has been fixed since DPM UR7:

• DPM console crash issues.
• If you try to back up a SharePoint site that uses SQL Always On as a content database, SQL logs are not truncated resulting in SQL disks to become full.
• 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.
• You try to back up Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) that have a replica and both the Active virtual machine and the Replica virtual machine are managed by the same System Center VMM server. Previously, you had no control to select between Active and Replica virtual machines for backup. This frequently caused backups to fail, depending on the setup.
• If you try to protect large number of virtual machines in a single Protection Group, and you have the VMM Helper Service enabled, some backups may fail with "System.TimeoutException".
• In some cases, alerts that are resolved in DPM are not synced in the DPM Central Console.
• 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.
• When you try to protect a SQL failover cluster, the Data Protection Manager UI may crash for backup or synchronization operation.
• DPM self-service recovery for SQL databases may fail with the error “Cannot connect to DPM server …”
• End User Recovery/SSRT may not work in some cases for mirrored SQL databases.
• You cannot protect a SQL database on an Availability Group (AG) if different AG have the same database name.

Get UR8 now! = https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3086084

Kind Regards
Markus Eliasson