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

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