Agent update failed

After installing the new Hotfix rollup package for DPM 2007 (KB979970) you have to update the agents. In my case this went fine for almost all agents.
Only the agents on the SharePoint servers had a nasty issue.

The (push) upgrade failed with the following error.

Agent Operation failed (ID 370)
The agent operation fauled because an error occurred wile running the installation program on <compter name> (ID 313). Details: The installation source for the product is not available. Verify that the source exits anf that you can access it (ox8007064c)
-----------------
The local agent installation shows a same kind of error:

DPMAgentInstaller failed with errorcode =8007064c, error says: The installation source for this product is not available.  Verify that the source exists and that you can access it.

Check log files in [WINDIR]Temp\MSDPM*.LOG
Press Enter key to close the window
-----------------
For this error messages it is not clear which installation files are missing.

The log MSDPMAgentPatchInstall.LOG (windir\temp) shows in more detail which files are required.
--------------------------
SI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:58:789]: SOURCEMGMT: Source is invalid due to missing/inaccessible package.
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:58:789]: Note: 1: 1706 2: -2147483647 3: dpmra.msi
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:58:789]: SOURCEMGMT: Processing net source list.
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: SOURCEMGMT: Now checking product {07CCDE6A-1D92-2C9C-D091-9E682643ABCC}
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: SOURCEMGMT: Attempting to use LastUsedSource from source list.
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: SOURCEMGMT: Trying source C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\RA\2.0.8844.0\.
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: Note: 1: 2203 2: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\RA\2.0.8844.0\dpmra.msi 3: -2147287037
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: SOURCEMGMT: Source is invalid due to missing/inaccessible package.
MSI (s) (8C:D0) [13:27:59:810]: MainEngineThread is returning 1612
-----------------------------

The agent upgrade requires the file dpmra.msi from the directory C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\RA\2.0.8844.0\.
This is actually the installation file from the current agent version (2.0.8844). The issue is that this directory does not exist on the server and the installation files are not in any other directory on the server.

Solution (workaround)
The only way I could get the required source files was installing the old agents files (2.0.8864) to (a temporary)machine. The source is available on the DPM server (\\dpmservername\c$\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Agents\RA\2.0.8844.0).
When installing the agent a temporary directory is created on the machine (like: 4cf3806aac3ed28e02810670b5) copy during installation the files from this directory to temp directory.
Now you have a valid copy of the installation files. Copy these installations files to the server that fails to upgrade the agent (directory C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\RA\2.0.8844.0\) and retry the agent upgrade

Not a very nice solution, but at least it worked for me…

DPM2010 IS RTM

DPM2010 has been released to manufacturing. Announced at MMS !!!

Evaluation software will be available this week and full packaged product (and pricing) will be available by the end of May as it is released into the various Microsoft channels.  It will be generally available and on the Microsoft Price List by June 1

More on:
http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/04/19/sc-data-protection-manager-2010-is-released-to-manufacturing.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/default.aspx

Great news (to bad I could not be there because of the Volcano thing)

Enjoy!!!

DPM 2007: Hotfix Rollup Package - KB979970

On March the 29th a new Hotfix rollup package for DPM 2007 has been release by Microsoft

Available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979970

Information form the Microsoft website:

This hotfix rollup resolves the following issues:

1. You may experience a crash in the Data Protection Manager engine when you run a tape job from a protected server.
2. When you use the Data Protection Manager Management Console to browse Microsoft SharePoint Server recovery points or when you back up a SharePoint point to tape from disk, you receive the following error message:

   PrmDatasetDatasourceMismatchForArchiveOfSC (=30132)

3. A SharePoint recovery point in a secondary Data Protection Manager has a different set of datasets than the corresponding recovery point in the primary Data Protection Manager.
4. Alerts for standby continuous replication (SCR) servers are not displayed in Microsoft Operations Manager.
5. Default disk allocations may grow unexpectedly for system state protection.
6. When you restore a SharePoint site that contains a WEB host header to an alternate location, the site is restored to the default site.
7. Shared Services Provider (SSP) database protection is blocked when one or more SSP names begin with the same SSP name.
8. The server is slow, and time-out errors may occur, when you run a backup-to-tape job.
9. Data Protection Manager-owned tapes are marked as unrecognized.
10. Data Protection Manager cannot retrieve SharePoint catalog information. Therefore, item-level recovery is not possible for some content databases. Additionally, you may receive the following error code:

    3103

11. You receive the following protection agent error code when bulk tape jobs cannot be completed successfully:

    0x80990C27

12. You may experience a Data Protection Manager engine crash during backup to tape.
13. The Data Protection Manager Management Console does not display recovery points before the year 2010 in some scenarios.

This hotfix rollup also includes all previously released hotfix rollups for Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1):

Prerequisites

The following list contains prerequisites for the hotfix rollup:

• You must have System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 installed.
• You must have critical update KB962975 installed

DPM 2010 the story so far..

On the technet DPM team blog Prashant Kumar (Program Manager | DPM Team) wrote a post with a lot of interesting background information on DPM 2010.
He describes how some of the new features in DPM 2010 help you to meet you business SLA’s.

• Automatic rerun of failed jobs;
• Automatic consistency checks;
• Automatic grow of DPM volumes;
• Automatic discovery of SharePoint and SQL databases;
• SLA reports.
  

Post can be found here

Dynamic Disk Hotfix

Quote from http://blogs.technet.com

A potential problem with Volume Manager on Windows Server 2008 systems may lead to data loss.

This hot fix is not DPM-specific.  However, because DPM servers do utilize dynamic disks, it is important to apply this hotfix on WS08-based DPM servers so that your backup-data is not lost from the DPM storage pool.

For more information please read the link below to the hot fix.

962975    Dynamic disks are marked as "Invalid" on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista when you bring the disks online, take the disks offline, or restart the computer if Data Protection Manager is installed

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962975

This hot fix does not apply to Windows Server 2008 R2

DPM 2010 RC documentation

As you might have noticed there is no documentation on DPM 2010 included in the RC download.

Mike of Scug.be  has done a good job in making screen-shots of the upgrade from DPM 2010 beta to DPM 2010 RC.

This might saves you from  some headaches.
http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/02/10/dpm-2010-upgrade-from-beta-to-rc.aspx

SharePoint 2007 recovery point fails after Password change

There are many reasons why a SharePoint recovery point keeps failing. It also a good idea to check the logs on the Web front-end and SQL backend server.

In our case we found the following errors in the system log of the SharePoint Web front-end

Event Type: Error Event Source: DCOM Event Category: None Event ID: 10004 Date: 10-2-2010 Time: 16:10:49 User: N/A Computer: <server_name> Description: DCOM got error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. " and was unable to logon <account_name> in order to run the server:{

Event Type: Error Event Source: DCOM Event Category: None Event ID: 10005 Date: 10-2-2010 Time: 18:14:55 User: N/A Computer: <server_name> Description:DCOM got error "The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. " attempting to start the service vds with arguments "" in order to run the server:

Reason / Cause
In our case this error was caused by a Password change of the account we used (a long time ago) to configure SharePoint protection.

Solution
After you change the password of the account you used for the ConfigureSharePointProtection, you need to run the commands again on the SharePoint Web Front-end machines.

ConfigureSharePoint –EnableSharePointProtection
ConfigureSharePoint –EnableSPSearchProtection
All available commands: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441708.aspx