I’m currently using Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 to provide consolidated disk based snapshots of our File Shares, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL databases.  I am in the process of upgrading our servers to Windows 2008 R2 and DPM was next on my list.  I really didn’t want to re-create the wheel and start from scratch (I have over 5TB’s worth of replicas on my Dell MD1000 and a plethora of protection groups setup).

In today’s post, I will provide you with a step by step guide in restoring your DPM server whilst retaining your DPM database and DPM replicas, and also explain a few gotcha’s that are worth noting that I had encountered during the process.

First item that we need to address is taking a backup of the DPM database itself.  TechNet have an article on “Backing up DPM Databases” http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795642.aspx and in summary you can backup the DPM Database to Tape by using a separate protection group within DPM itself and selecting short-term protection using tape.  Please note that you cannot protect the DPM databases as replicas to disk.  The other 2 methods of protecting your DPM database is by utilising 3rd party backup software or a secondary DPM server.  You can also for good measure take a file copy of the DPM database if you are utilising SQL 2005 Express.  The Database file by default is located under “\%programfiles%\Microsoft DPM\DPM\DPMDB”.  You will obviously need to stop the SQL service first before attempting a file copy.  Microsoft also recommend to take a copy of the configuration folder located under \Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Config.  This folder contains the DPMA.xml file which is the tape drive remapping file .

So now that we have a copy of the database, here are the steps required to perform a database recovery onto a new server;

• Install Windows operating system and DPM’s requirements.  In my case I installed Windows 2008 R2. (Just a word of note, Windows setup may seem to hang at the partition screen if you have many volumes due to your existing replicas.  I had to wait 30 minutes in my case)
• Ensure that the replicas partition are intact and not accidently deleted.
• Re-install Data Protection Manager and all it’s service packs.
• Using the DpmSync command line tool, run the following command to synchronize the backed up DPM database. 

DpmSync –RestoreDb –DbLoc location –InstanceName server\instance]

In my case, I was restoring from a local copy of the DPM database, so I utilised the following command;

DpmSync –RestoreDb -DbLoc C:\DPMDB2007rtm.bak

• After successfully restoring the DPM database, you will also need to run the DpmSync –Sync command to synchronise the recently restored database.

If we now launch the DPM 2007 Administrator Console and navigate to the Protection Tab you will notice that all your protection Groups are listed, albeit in a consistent state.  This is the best way in confirming that your original DPM database was successfully restored and synced correctly.

You should at this stage force a consistency check against all your protection groups to ensure you have the most up to date copy of your data.

In the second part of this post I will outline some of the issues that I had encountered with the re-installation of DPM 2007 on a Windows 2008 R2 server.  First issue that I ran into was the below error message that I had received when clicking on the Reporting Tab within DPM 2007 Administrator Console;

“DPM could not connect to SQL Reporting Services server because IIS connectivity issues. ID: 3013”

The below message states that I should restart the World Wide Web Publishing Service which in my case did not fix my issue.

The issue is a little deeper than just a simple restart of the WWW Publishing Service and is actually directly related to inadequate permissions attached to the ReportServer Virtual Directory in IIS 7.5.  This issue actually first arose with Windows 2008 and IIS 7 and obviously flows through to Windows 2008 R2 and IIS 7.5.

The fix is quite simple which I will outline in the following steps;

• Navigate to Administrative Tools / Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, expand Sites / Default Web Site / ReportServer$MS$DPM2007$.
• Under IIS on the middle navigation pane, double click on Handler Mappings

• Under Actions, click on Edit Feature Permissions …

• Ensure that only Read and Script are selected.

• Finally, restart IIS for good measure.

If we now navigate back to the Reporting Tab, we are presented with our Report categories as per the below screen capture.

The next issue encountered is that I had noticed my Exchange Servers Protection group that I had setup was stating that my Replica’s were inconsistent, even though I had attempted to “Perform a consistency check..”

DPM in most instances provides you with some detailed descriptions to their alerts and low and behold my eseutil.exe and ese.dll were missing or were the incorrect version.  It is important to ensure these are up to date in particular with later Exchange service packs.  In my case, I needed to copy the latest versions from my Exchange 2007 Server which was now running Service Pack 2.  There are 2 ways to accomplish this;

1. Install the latest Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 management tools on the DPM server that matches the version and service pack level of Exchange that you are running (in my case it was Service Pack 2). 
2. Copy the eseutil.exe and ese.dll files from your Exchange 2007 server to c:\program files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin\.  These files are located under c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\bin on your Exchange Server.

That’s it!  Hopefully I have provided you with a fairly straightforward method on re-installing Data Protection Manager onto new or existing hardware without recreating the original protection groups and or existing replicas.

As this is my first post for the year, I would like to wish everyone a “belated” Happy Prosperous New Year and looking forward to all your comments and feedback.

References

Using DpmSync – TechNet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb808877.aspx

Protected Computer Software Prerequisites -TechNet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb808827.aspx