The Application Virtualization (App-V) Dashboard helps customers monitor virtualized software applications with a graphical display that makes it easy to stay on top of application usage, health, and compliance. Using the Dashboard’s built-in charts, gauges, and tables, customers can track any APP-V dataset in near-real time.   The Dashboard is now in beta release. Want to give your customers an advance look at the Dashboard, and a chance to provide feedback so it best meets their needs...(read more)

Hey All,

This is part 3 of our Sharepoint protection in DPM 2010 serie and also the last part.

You can find the other two parts here:

http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/03/11/sharepoint-2010-protection-in-dpm-2010-part-1.aspx

http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/03/12/sharepoint-2010-protection-in-dpm-2010-part-2.aspx

 

Item-level recovery

So what is Item-level recovery?  Item-level recovery means that you can recover a single document, list, page or whatever.  While it was already possible in Sharepoint 2007 and DPM 2007, you needed a sharepoint recovery farm to do this.  And the recovery farm had to be at the exact level as the production farm.  If you hadn’t had this farm, then you could only recover a complete farm or site collection.

With Sharepoint 2010 and DPM 2010, you can do item-level recovery without the need of a recovery farm.

Every 24 hours, DPM will create a catalogue of the Sharepoint environment in order to allow the item-level recovery.  In case you need to do an item-level recovery before the 24 hour (such as demo-purposes :-)) you can run the following powershell commands to force this task

$pg = Get-ProtectionGroup <dpmservername>

$ds = Get-Datasource $pg[index1] (index1 points to the protection where

SharePoint is protected, to see all protection groups try $pg)

Start-CreateCatalog $ds[index2] (index2 points to the SharePoint datasource,

to see all datasources try $ds)

Example

In my demo environment, I have a sharepoint farm running which is the view you will get after a basic installation with one site configured

As you can see in the screenshot, I have modified the home page a bit.  Now I’m going to modify it again

Of course, now I realize I made a mistake, don’t have a clue what it used to be before and I call IT to restore :-)

So IT will start from the DPM UI

As you can see, In the recovery pane, I can see the sharepoint farm and some items under there.  I need to recover a page, so I need to be in the WSS Content

After some drilling down, I reached the page that need to be recovered.  I select this page, also select the time from which I want to recover and start a recovery.

So here are my options.

• Recover to original site
• Recover to alternate site
• Export selected items into a network folder (not possible in this case)
• to tape

In our case, I’m going to recover to the original site

Now I get the option to do a recovery without or with a recovery farm.  Since the purpose of today was to demonstrate it without the recovery farm…

Now you need to make some decisions.  The first you need to decide is the SQL instance that you want to use to recover temporarily the content database where the item is located.  You can use the same SQL instance as where the production farm is located, but this will give some additional load so if that is not an option, choose another SQL instance if possible.

The second choice you need to make is a location where the database can be temporarily copied to.  This can be any volume or share that you want, but you need to have enough space free to copy the entire database to that location.

Next screen, you will need to give again a file location for the temporary location of the item that you want to recover.  This has to be on a front-end web server so that the item can be inserted from there into the sharepoint farm.

Again some options in the next screen.  the security that you want to apply, bandwidth throttling if necessary,  SAN recovery if that is supported and a notification if you have configured email notification

Finally you will receive the summary.

And here the recovery is busy.  You can close this window and follow the progress in the jobs pane.

And here you can see that the recovery is successful.

Now when I switch back to the sharepoint farm, you can see that my original page is restored

That’s it

Cheers,

Mike

The last weeks there were some major updates on the release of System Center Service Manager. A little overview:

• The Service Manager announce the availability of the EN-US version of Service Manager Release Candidate (RC). In this build there are some significant improvements to stability and performance as well as a number of additional features:
  • Improved Performance, Scale and Stability
  • Improved Notifications with batching email
  • New Change Management Features
    • Reviewer Notification
    • Line Manager Approval
  • New and Updated Reports
  • Improved Self Service Software Provisioning
  • Improved View Editing
  • UX Improvements throughout the product
  • Data Warehouse improvements
  • Authoring Tool Improvements
    • Extending and adding classes and relationships
    • Support for controls in form customization
    • Added workflow activities in activity library
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Localizability and Globalization bug fixed
  • Supportability bug fixes
  • To download, simply go to the Downloads link for this connection, and find Service Manager Release Candidate or follow this direct link and then select all of the following three files on the download details page:
    • SMCDImage_AMD64.exe
    • SMCDImage_x86.exe
    • SCSM_RC_documentation.zip
• Service Manager needs Authorization Manager Hotfix
  • http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975332/en-us
  • http://blogs.technet.com/umeno/archive/2010/03/12/service-manager-needs-authorization-manager-hotfix.aspx
  • This hotfox fixes an issue that occurs with Data Access Service (sdk service) or the Management Service (healthservice) when either SM or DWStagingandConfig database servers become temporarily unavailable.
• Maybe not direct the latest news, but an important topic in the Service Manager environment is the Microsoft Operations Framework. Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 delivers practical guidance for everyday IT practices and activities. SCSM helps to apply and automate these activities. People who want to go a bit deeper in this framework:
  • Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 library
  • Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 download

Have fun with the RC testing.

Kind Regards,

Kurt

Hey All,

This is the second part of the 3-part sharepoint 2010 protection series

In the first part we looked at the things that were necessary as prerequiste to protect a sharepoint farm.  We also looked at some details about sharepoint protection.

Today, we gonna create a protection group for sharepoint.

Background information

This picture shows how DPM works for sharepoint protection.

So when we are protecting a sharepoint farm (as said in the previous post) with one click, then we are protecting all these items with their different writers.

Basically, when you want to protect a sharepoint farm, DPM 2010 will do everything for you in the back-end.  That’s easy :-)

Don’t forget, whenever you create a new content database, and the auto-protect option is enabled, then it will be automatically protected within 24 hours.

You will however get a warning alert in the Console that there is a new content database.

The same will happen when the Sharepoint Administrators delete a content database.  DPM 2010 will figure this out, give you a warning alert, and you just need to follow the information in that alert to reconfigure the protection group.

One other thing that can go wrong is that the Sharepoint administrators change the farm administrator password that you use to protect (see previous post).  At that moment, you will get a warning alert but DPM will continue to backup everything he knows.  However, he won’t be able to query the config database anymore, so he won’t know when there are (for example) new content databases.  So if you are having this issue, perform the commands again from my previous post with the new password (or even new user and passwords) and you’re back ok.

Create the protection group

Ok, so let’s create a protection group for sharepoint.

Choose Servers to continue

When I open my sharepoint server, I will see a possibility of choosing a sharepoint farm.  So I select it

Here I choose my short-term and long term protection.  No tape library in my environment here so…

Time to choose the settings for the short-term protection.  So here you can define how long you want to be able to recover and when he needs to take a full express backup.  Note that this is the only possibility for sharepoint farm protection.  Synchronizations are not possible.  If you wander how many disk space this is going to eat, then you need to calculate your chunk that you have each day.  But how do you calculate this chunk?  Well, with DPM you can find out, so my suggestion would be to use the tool a few days to see the changes, and use the excel sheets that can do an estimate based on your input.

DPM will calculate itself the diskspace, but since it doesn’t know how many data changes there are on average a day, it will remain an estimate.  You can however choose to let the auto-grow option on so that it will automatically grows the volume.  (DPM admins, don’t forget to review the great disk utilization reports weekly :-))

Note that the co-location option is not selectable.  This is because co-location is not supported for Sharepoint protection.

Choose when you want to create the initial replica.  This is preferred to do outside the working hours if you are having a large farm that is used intensively.

Here you have the option to do an automatic consistency check when the replica isn’t consistent anymore or to do it on a daily base on a fixed hour.  My advice, if possible, do it automatically whenever it is inconsistent but if the load is too heavy on your production sharepoint servers, then schedule it on a daily base after working hours or at the most convenient time.

Finally the summary

Ok.  In our next post, we will show you how you can do an item-level recovery.

Cheers,

Mike

Hey All,

This post will the first of three about sharepoint protection.

Part 1 will be about the preparation to protect a sharepoint farm and some background information what DPM can do with your sharepoint farm.

Part 2 will be about creating a protection group for the sharepoint farm and some explanation on how it works

Part 3 will be an example of how you can do level-item restore and what is necessary to achieve this.

 

Background information

So what can we protect with DPM 2010?  Here’s the list

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010
• Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0
• Windows SharePoint Services version 2.0

So what can we do?  We can do a farm protection with one-click, there is the possibility of automatically protecting new content databases.  We can do a recovery of an entire farm, an entier Database, a Site Collection, a Site and an Item. 

Please note that this Site and Item level recovery only works with Sharepoint 2010 without a recovery farm.

Oke, sound all good, time to prepare my environment for Sharepoint protection.

 

Preparing the Sharepoint environment

First is first, in my labo environment, I only had one server running everything from sharepoint, the front-end IIS, the Sharepoint 2010 application and the SQL server.  It ran on a windows server 2008 R2 and was the latest beta available on the connect site.

I started with deploying an agent to the sharepoint server.  After that is done, you need to configure something extra on the sharepoint box. So here goes:

Open a command prompt as administrator and go to the DPM agent installation bin folder(default: %programfiles%\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin)

Run the command ConfigureSharepoint.exe –enableSharepointProtection

This will enable the protection of the sharepoint farm.  It will enable the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object and the WSS VSS writer.  As you can see in the screenshot, it will ask you for a username and password.  This needs to be the (or a) farm administrator account.

After that, we are going to run another command: ConfigureSharepoint.exe EnableSPSearchProtection

This will enable the protection of the Search provider.  Again, you need to enter the username and password for a sharepoint administrator.

Oke, now let’s have a better look at the command.

 

Syntax:
ConfigureSharePoint.exe [-EnableSharePointProtection] | [-EnableSPSearchProtection] | [-ResolveAllSqlAliases] | [-SetTempPath <Path>]

Requirement:
This command should be run as a local administrator. For Windows 2008 onwards, ensure that this command is run from an elevated command prompt.

Parameters:
-EnableSharePointProtection
Enables the protection of SharePoint farm. It registers the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object and enables the WSS VSS writer. When prompted to enter user name and password, enter the credentials of the SharePoint farm administrator.

-EnableSPSearchProtection
Enables the protection of WSS 3.0 Search and MOSS 2007 SSP. It registers the WSSCmdletsWrapper DCOM object. When prompted to enter user name and password, enter the credentials of the SharePoint farm administrator.

-ResolveAllSqlAliases
This option can be run only after running -EnableSharePointProtection or -EnableSPSearchProtection on the server. It provides information about all the SQL aliases reported by the WSS VSS writer and resolves them to the corresponding SQL Server instance names. If a SharePoint database is mirrored and configured with SQL alias then the corresponding mirror's SQL Server instance name is displayed as well. This option also reports all the SQL aliases that cannot be resolved to any SQL Server.

-SetTempPath <Path>
Sets the environment variable TEMP and TMP to the specified path

 

The good observer ;-) has seen that you can run the parameters all at once so that you don’t need to give the username and password twice.

One important note… The farm administrator account doesn’t need to be local administrator on the Web Front End.  This was a requirement for DPM 2007.  From the moment you do perform the command, DPM 2010 will give the following permissions to the sharepoint farm administrator:

• Read and Execute to all DPM directories.
• Read, Execute and Write (all) access on Temp directory in the DPM directory.
• Read permissions to the DPM hive in the registry.

That’s it for now, next post will be the creation of a protection group

Cheers,

Mike

Hey All,

I’m receiving sometimes the question about manual installation of DPM agents.  Sometimes this is because off using deployment tools, other times it is because of firewall restrictions on the server.

The DPM agent installer from the console works great but when it needs to be done manual, it just needs to be done manual.

So for this, here is a small example on how to achieve this.

 

In this example, I will install the agent manually on the server, but it is perfectly possible to do this with SCCM or SCE or MDT.

 

First we need to find the agent installer sources

Depending on which version you need, choose it.  In this case it was a 64-bit server.

When the agent installation is complete, we need to run following command

The command is: SetDpmServer.exe –dpmServerName <name server>

Note that when the DPM server is in another domain, use the FQDN

As you can see, the DPM command is now configuring a few items

After that, you need to go to the console and choose to install agents

But instead of choosing the option Install Agents you need to choose Attach Agents and then depending on your situation: Computers on Active Directory Domain or Computers in Workgroup or Untrusted Domain

In my case, it is Computers on Active Directory Domain

In this window you need to choose your servers.  This can be one server but multiple at the same time is also possible.

Give the correct credentials

A review, press Attach to start the task

And quickly after, you will get the notification that it is a success.

That’s it.

But what if you want to do the command part on the server to be protected automatically?

This can be achieved by using parameters in your installation package for SCCM, MDT or SCE

USAGE:
DpmAgentInstaller.exe [/q] [<DPM server name>]

[<DPM server name>]
The name of the DPM server to be used for protecting this computer. Specify this parameter if the DPM server is known. If you are installing the DPM protection agent as a part of an image, skip this parameter. You can set the DPM server later using the SetDpmServer.exe tool.
[/q]
Performs a silent install.

So using the following command in your package should solve your problem here: DpmAgentInstaller.exe /q <DPMServerName>

So is this something you would want to use or not?  In my opinion, every windows server that you deploy should receive an agent.  Why?  Because you never know when you need to backup that server.  With DPM it is very easy to set the agent for a server as disabled.  It won’t use any license so that won’t cause a problem.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers,

Mike

The Infront TrendMicro Management Pack allows customers to proactively monitor their TrendMicro environment. This Management Pack allows for the monitoring of the end-to-end security and spam protection starting from the TrendMicro OfficeScan client to the OfficeScan server, your ScanMail environment and your Interscan Messaging Security Suite. The Management Pack supplies critical events and alerts on viruses and spam to Operations Manager, and also monitors the health, performance, security and...(read more)

Quest has announced that the QMX VMware extension is now free via vCenter and vSphere. The Quest Management Extensions (QMX) - Operations Manager 2007 Edition VMware solution supports all versions of VMware. You can download it from here http://www.management-extensions.org/entry.jspa?externalID=100338&categoryID=252     Have fun, Alexandre Verkinderen...(read more)

Hi all, I am very proud to be able to announce that we will be able to host a Unique OpsMgr 2007 R2 training event in Belgium. Is the average training not meeting the depth of technical content you need? Would you like the receive your training from someone that received the prestigious MVP Award? Wished you could receive training from someone that co-authored a book on the topic he is teaching? Are you looking for real 400 level training? Want training from a consultant with plenty of real-life...(read more)

Yes, MMS 2010 is coming soon and it will be an exciting week. The complete SCUG team from Belgium will be there!

• MMS info : Microsoft Management Summit 2010
• The entire session schedule is available on http://www.mms-2010.com/public/sessions.aspx

My schedule is made and I will have a more or less complete Service Manager week. From Service Manager assessment to customizing the environment, a complete track is available in this week. Little overview:

Breakout sessions:

• Implementation, Architecture and Administration of a Service Manager Deployment
• Service Manager Integration with System Center
• Extending and Customizing Service Manager
• Service Manager 2010: Drilldown
• System Center Service Manager: Pre-assessment Considerations
• Service Manager: Data Warehouse and Custom Report Creation
• Real World Incident Management on microsoft.com
• Automating and Simplifying Compliance and Risk with System Center: Tour Compliance and Risk Mgmt with System Center Service Manager 2010
• + 3 breakout session on Opalis Integration Server
• + some partner sessions who are covering their solutions on top of Service Manager

Instructor lab sessions:

• Service Manager 2010 Data Warehouse and Reporting
• Automating IT Processes on Service Manager 2010
• Incident and Change Management in Service Manager 2010
• Service Manager Integration with System Center
• Implementing Service Manager 2010
• Introduction to Opalis

For the other System Center products, I see a lot of SCCM vNext and SCOM customization sessions. Will be certainly followed by our other SCUG attendees :-)

Maybe we have a big announcement at MMS. There is some speculating and people who are taking bets that Service Manager might be announced as RTM at MMS. (Microsoft to RTM System Center Service Manager at MMS?) I’ll keep you posted on this !

Microsoft just announced the beta release of the MOF 4.0 Foundation Course. This training course is intended primarily for those who deliver service management-focused training. It’s also designed to supplement existing materials utilized by those in the greater training community. These materials will help instructors teach IT pros how to think about system integration and dependencies, and will add value to a range of technical training courses. The course is designed to introduce participants...(read more)

Hey All,

Microsoft just released an excel document called the SCDPM Upgrade Advisor

http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/26/upgrade-advisor-for-dpm-2010-now-available.aspx

This document will give you guidelines in how to upgrade SCDPM 2007 installations to DPM 2010 installations, even if your DPM 2007 is running on 32-bit OS.

Looks great and with a lot of options to choose, even when you have a secondary DPM server you can choose this option.

Cheers,

Mike

Hey All,

Last post, I’ve installed remotely a client agent to a workstation in another domain and over VPN.  Now it is time to create a protection group with a policy and do the first synchronization.  Again I want to see how it will react when I do this when the workstation is under a heavy load.  I figured that I might need to do this when a user is working at home or in a hotel and so I need to know if the synchronization will work.

During the first synchronization, I worked on the laptop and I was doing the following tasks:

* VPN open

* Outlook open

* MSN and Office Messenger Open

* Tweetdeck open

* Listening at an internet radio

* Downloading large files from the Microsoft Connect site

* Many programs open and about 30 internet pages open

But first is first, let’s create a protection group

On the second screen, I choose for Clients instead of servers

" border="0" alt="clip_image001" src="http://scug.be/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/scdpm/clip_5F00_image0016_5F00_thumb_5F00_75D7519A.png" width="244" height="184" />

On the next screen, I can select my clients.  The good part here is that if you select clients that don’t have an agent yet, you can install them now, and those who have an agent but aren’t connected yet to the DPM server will be attached.  In my case, the client already has an agent and is attached, so I just select my client.  Because I installed the agent, it is now visible in the list, although it is in another domain.

" border="0" alt="clip_image001" src="http://scug.be/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/scdpm/clip_5F00_image0018_5F00_thumb_5F00_45142422.png" width="244" height="184" />

Here it becomes very interesting. I can start on this screen by creating inclusions and exclusions for my clients.

Here you can see that I have included My Documents but excluded music and temporary internet files

You can add your own directories to it but you already receive a nice list of possibilities

Also, on that screen is an option where you can allow your users to add directories themselves that need to be protected.  But if you have excluded a folder and they still want to protect it, they will get a notification that it is not possible (see later in this post)

And you also have the possibility to exclude certain file types

I have to choose for Short term protection since I don’t have a tape drive in my test environment

Now this will be one were a lot of discussion will be.  How many times a day do you want to synchronize, what will be the retention range, how long before a disconnected client needs to start alerting?

For the tests I kept it at a minimum but these settings will need to be thought through very good in a real-life situation.

This is the alerting option, as said, it will need some serious thinking what the setting will be here.  Is 14 days (the default) enough?  When you are away for 2 weeks on holiday, then the 14 days is not enough because you are then away from the office for about 18 days (first and last weekend included), so every company will need to think this through.

Now I need to chose my storage.  For this test I will not co-locate my data because I don’t have enough disk space for this in my test environment.  What I have read about it is that you choose co-location from the moment you have 10 clients.  If you are below, you better split-up so that you don’t lose too much storage.

I also let the Automatically grow the volume option on.  This is a very handy new feature and many DPM administrators that are now using DPM 2007 will be very happy with it.  Of course this is a risk as your volumes can keep growing until you are out of disk space, but a good backup admin (I actually prefer Protection and DR admin for this product :-) will check the reports on a regular base so that should not cause any problems.

The summary, which includes the link to Optimize Performance which I will probably discussing later on

And finally the success.

So I finally started the synchronization and waited, waited, waited for a very long time.

Some other screenshots:

Trying to add the music folder to the protected items

DPM Synchronizing

Final Conclusion and lessons learnt

The process seems to be working great.  Although I took it through a heavy test-drive everything worked flawlessly.

The only minor point was the initial synchronization.  It took about half an hour to synchronize 170 MB.  But then again, I was pushing the limits.  But I needed to know how DPM would react because you might need to do this once, and 170 MB of changes will occur on client workstation. 

Cheers,

Mike

Hey All,

One of the exiting features of DPM 2010 is the improved client protection of workstations.  In this post, I’ll give some more information about it.  To make it a bit tricky, I decided to try to install the agent on a workstation
(windows 7, 32-bit) that resides

a. In a different domain (but a fully trusted domain)

b. Is not in the office but connected through a VPN, sitting at home

Since I assume that client protection will be getting more and more attention from companies, I decided to test it out thoroughly.  Both for the installation and the first synchronization I decided not to follow the guidelines but really try to do the worst scenario.

 

1. The installation

Installing the client is the same as installing a server.  Manuals from the beta (before the RC) mentioned that I should install it manually (or through solutions such as SCCM or SCE) but I thought that it also would be possible to do this through the UI.

I start by taking the "install agent” option since I didn’t installed it yet.  Note also the attach agents that can be used when an agent is installed manually.

Now I need to select the workstation.  He will only list the workstations and servers from the domain that the DPM server resides in, so to connect  to my workstation on another domain, I had to type in the FQDN name in the box

Here I can give in the credentials for a user that has administrative rights on the workstation in that domain

I decided here not to restart the workstation automatically, instead, I wanted to test if it really is necessary to restart which could be a killer in very large environments.

Finally, the summary and ready to install.  Now one little note drew my attention: The computer may momentarily lose network connectivity during installation.

Since the workstation is on a client vpn, this could be tricky :-)

Also, before you can actually do this, you need to make sure that your firewall is configured correctly.  I failed the first time because my firewall was wrong configured.

And then the screen of success came.  Now I didn’t see the client lose network connectivity, and if it did, then it had to be very short because my VPN tunnel didn’t drop so that seems to be working.

Now let’s look a bit at the changes on the client.

First, I found two new services

Second, here’s how the Client UI looks:

This client already has a policy, but how that works I will explain in next post.

Lessons learnt:

* It is possible to install the agent on a workstation through the GUI from DPM itself.

* You can do it over a VPN connection

* Windows 7 doesn’t need to reboot afterwards

* The DPM client UI will demonstrate a small icon in the notification area after the reboot, but you can start it by starting manually the DPM UI without rebooting

* In windows 7, when you want to see this icon, you need to change the notification settings

And this is the icon, and more information when you right-click on it

" border="0" alt="clip_image001" src="http://scug.be/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/scdpm/clip_5F00_image0016_5F00_thumb_5F00_41F30865.png" width="230" height="244" />

Last picture is from a client that is disconnect from the server

Allright, next post: Create a protection group and do the first synchronization, over the VPN of course :-)

Cheers,

Mike

MMS 2010 will be in Las Vegas April 19-23, and registration is now open. The list of planned sessions is available at http://www.mms-2010.com/public/sessions.aspx . There are 28 breakout sessions specific to OpsMgr 2007, and there are some very good ones you won’t want to miss. MVPs that will be presenting OpsMgr-related topics include John Joyner, Maarten Goet, Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw, and David Allen. Many product managers will also be presenting on OpsMgr 2007 R2 topics. In addition, Brian...(read more)