DPM 2007

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.

An Update on Some Recent Posts

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on a couple of my more recent blog posts.

First, as you may recall, I tried disabling virtual memory on my Data Protection Manager server in an effort to eliminate paging and the problems with inconsistent replicas that paging seems to cause. Since that time, all of the replicas of my protected volumes have remained in a consistent state.  The replicas for my Exchange storage groups became inconsistent after about a day, and my system state replicas became inconsistent about a day or two later.

Although I use multiple methods to back up my network, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I ended up replacing the system board in my DPM server tonight, and upgraded from 2 GB of RAM to 4 GB. I will keep you posted on what happens.

The other issue that I wanted to talk about was the problems that I am having with Windows 7 and the wireless NIC that’s built into my lab laptop. After doing some more research, I have discovered that the issue may be hardware related. I found a technical article that said that there is a bug in my laptop’s firmware and that because of the bug, you have to flash the BIOS before you will be able to install Windows Vista SP2. According to the article, the bug was directly related to the wireless NIC.

I went ahead and flashed the BIOS, and for kicks I installed Windows Vista with SP2. Unfortunately, I am now having the same issue with Vista that I was having with Windows 7. One thing that may possibly be causing the problem though is buggy drivers. I’m not positive, but I may have been running the 32-bit version of Vista when everything was working correctly. I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and am currently using the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, I am going to need the machine for a project that I am working on for the next two months, so it will be August before I will be able to blow Windows off of the machine and test my theory.

Until then, I want to say thank you to Glen at Microsoft for his helpful suggestions.

DMP Inconsistencies, Part 2

It’s been 24 hours since my last post. At this point, it seems as though disabling the virtual memory on my DPM 2007 server was only a partial solution. My protected volumes have remained consistent, but my Exchange storage groups have become inconsistent, and I am unable to make them consistent.

I knew that disabling the virtual memory was a risky solution, but I wanted to try it any way. I guess my next move will be to replace the server’s system board with something that can accomodate more RAM.

Data Protection Manager Inconsistencies

Even though I operate what is essentially a one man shop, I use System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) to protect my data. Although my DPM server has been working relatively well for quite some time now, I have been getting a lot of errors lately due to inconsistant replicas.

I spoke to someone at Microsoft about the problem, and they asked about my server’s hardware. My server met all of the requirements, but they explained to me that the 2 GB of memory that is required is a minimum, and that in many cases more memory is actually required. From what I have been able to gather, if the server pages data to virtual memory during the replica creation or synchronization, it will cause the replica to become inconsistant.

Unfortunately, I am operating DPM on an older server, and the server’s system board can not accomodate more than 2 GB of RAM. Since I can’t add any more memory to the server, and replacing the server isn’t an option right now, I tried disabling the server’s virtual memory.

Only time will tell if this was a good idea or a bad idea, but as of right now all of my replicas are consistant. I’ll keep you updated on how this idea ends up working out.