DPM 2007 Agent Deployment

I am flying to Orlando in the morning to speak at the TechMentor conference that I mentioned in my blog a few days ago. At the last minute, I decided that I wanted to do a demo in one of my presentations that shows how you can backup Hyper-V with Data Protection Manager 2007. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the agent to install on my Hyper-V server.

In the past when this has happened, the problem was related to DNS records being incorrect. This time all of my DNS entries were fine though. I spent four hours digging through error logs and searching the Web. I investigated everything from missing patches to missing group memberships to invalid WMI settings.

At around midnight I got frustrated and went for a walk. When I came back I just happened to glance at the clock on the Hyper-V server and noticed that it was out of sync with my domain controllers. As soon as I reset the clock, everything started working. It just goes to show that sometimes the simplest things can cause the biggest problems.