Unable to configure protection for Vmware VMs

Hi,

Today I ran into a problem while configuring protection for a VMware virtual machine. I've previously successfully protected VMs on the same cluster and datstoreso I draw the conclusion it was the VM itself that was causing the issue.

Error: In the DPM-console I had the following error which clearly states why the configure protection job failed: The VM has one or several snapshots.

Resolution: I contacted the person who had created the snapshot and asked if it was OK for me to delete that snapshot. Then I logged onto the vSphere-console and deleted the snapshot. After that the configure protection-job completed successfully and the Replica creation could begin.

Conclusion: Before you start adding protection for your VMware VMs. Make sure you are not having an unsupported scenario as DPM VMware protection does not support the following scenarios:

1. Raw Device Mapping (RDM) pass thru disks can be configured in either physical compatibility mode or virtual compatibility mode. Physical RDM (PRDM) is not supported, however Virtual RDM (VRDM) is supported.
   
2. Clustered VMs are supported, however VMs hosted on shared disk clusters are not supported. Change tracking on shared disks is not supported by VMware.
   
3. DPM cannot detect or protect VApps.
   
4. DPM currently cannot protect VMware VMs to tape or a secondary DPM server.
   
5. Manual replica creation is not supported. You must either let DPM create the initial replica at the time of protection or schedule it to run later.
   
6. DPM can protect VMs with snapshots, however the snapshots are not backed up and are not restored during a VM recovery. If the snapshot was created before protection, DPM cannot protect that VM because VMware does not support enabling change tracking for any VM that has existing snapshots. A work around is to delete the existing snapshots.
   
7. The Microsoft Operations Manager console does not currently support monitoring VMware data sources, however they will show up under the All Datasources view. VMware protection alerts will only show under All Alerts. You can modify the OpsMgr management pack (MP) by making a custom view and overriding the DPM MP.

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