Kim Oppalfens and I did a session at community day together: Setting up & Configuring SQL Server to support your SCCM & SCOM environment System Center Configuration Manager and Operations Manager both need SQL Server. In this session we will show you what the best practices are for having a smooth running SQL server for our System Center environment. Having a good initial setup and configuration is not the only important thing, doing regular health checks on your SQL server is even more important...(read more)

I am happy to inform you that I have received the 2009 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for System Center Configuration Manager . This is certainly a great honor for me. Thank you Microsoft, blog readers and all the community members that helped me out! Thanks for the recognition. I am delighted. Hope it helps , Kenny Buntinx...(read more)

// Note: For some reason, my tables are not shown.  I'll try to fix this but I don't seem to be able to figure out why... Sorry about that.

As promised, here is a guidance on how to start a DPM project, based on the IPD Guides of Microsoft.

First thing to know is when you implement a DPM project (and this counts for about ALL of the System Center Suite) you need to know and understand exactly the business requirements.  Without them, it is impossible to deliver a great implementation.  With them, and understanding them, then the implementation will be quick, easy and your backup worries will decrease a lot.

Oke, here goes

First, I will give the Decision Flow according to the IPD

All these steps will now be discussed

Step 1: Project Scope

In this Step, you will need to collect all the information necessary for the implementation.

• AD domain & Forest information

You start with the AD Domain and Forest information.  The servers you need to protect need to be in the same domain or there have to be a two-way cross-domain or cross-forest trust between the domains where the protected servers will be located.

I normally use the following table to write down the information

Domain Name

FQDN

Netbiosname

DC

• Network Topology and Bandwidth

Make sure that you have an overview of the Network Topology and Bandwidth.  It will be difficult to protect a server every 15 minutes if it is located on a WAN connection that has high latency or doesn’t always have connectivity.  A drawing of the topology can be very handy when designing the solution.

• Data Loss Tolerance

The business will need to give this input.  What is tolerated in case of a disaster.  This is the equivalent to the recovery point objective (RPO).  This is necessary to determine the load on servers, storage and tapes.  Don’t let the business tell you that there is no tolerance for data loss if they are not prepared to pay the price for the storage, servers and tapes.  If there is not enough budget, then you can’t get it all…

• Retention Range

Q from IT: How long must data be kept for availability?

A from business:…

Mostly it is important to verify if all services / data / … have the same retention range.  From time to time it is not necessary to keep certain data for 6 months or longer.  You should always ask the business whether they need a 3 month copy or if the last week is ok.  The better you precise the question about the different applications, the better the answers will be and you will save storage and tapes that you can use for more important issues.

Q from IT: Are you under some regularity compliance? (HIPAA, SOX…)

A from business:…

If you are under compliance, the retention ranges and stuff are already defined for you.  Read them and implement them.  End of story.

• Speed of data Recovery

This is similar to the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and will determine when disk is used or when tape is used.  The quicker you need to be able to recover, the more disk you will use and vice versa.

• End-User Recovery

Will end-users be able to recover their own deleted files without the intervention of IT? What’s the business requirement on this one?

• BCP / DRP

Will this implementation be part of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or/and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP).  In other words, if it is part of the BCP, this means that you need to be able to recover crashed items asap.  If it is only part of the DRP plan, then you need to have a good strategy to recover when things fail, but then it is not necessary to recover on the spot.

• Future plans

Are there any business acquisitions or divestments planned in the near future?  Will the DPM solution be used for this?  Are there servers or applications that will be retired in the near future.  Do we need to calculate a new application in the design?

Step 2: Determine What Data Will Be Protected

In this step, you will need to figure out what kind of data you will be protecting.

• Virtual Machines

As you know, DPM can protect entire guest VM’s.  Fill in the next tables to get an overview of all VM’s you need to protect (This includes Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 SP1 virtual machines)

Additional note: Pass-through disks are NOT protected with this method.  You will need to backup that disk with an agent inside the VM.

Host	Host IP	Guest	Guest IP

 

• Exchange Server

DPM can protect only mailbox servers.  So no edge servers or other roles.  Only the data is protected.

Additional information:

- Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007 Single Copy Cluster (SCC); DPM agent on all nodes in the cluster

- Exchange Server 2007 local continuous replication (LCR): Install the DPM agent on both the active and passive node

- Exchange Server 2007 cluster continuous replication (CCR): The DPM agent must be installed on both nodes in the cluster

- Exchange Server 2007 SP1 standby continuous replication (SCR): Install the DPM agent on the active node and standby nodes

Again, I use a simple table and fill in the data

Servername	OS	Server IP	Storage Group	Database

• Sharepoint services

What are we going to protect here?  Again my tables… :-)

Servername	OS	Server IP	Farmname	Site

This can be for Sharepoint Services 3.0, MOSS 2007 or Sharepoint portal server 2003.

Please note that when you protect a sharepoint farm or a sharepoint services site that you don’t need to backup that database separately afterwards.  It will only cause you troubles.

Also note that for recovering your sharepoint sites, you will need a recovery server.  So keep that in mind when you need to ask for more servers.

• Volumes, folders and shares

No explanation necessary here I think, only remember that we are talking about windows server 2003 SP1 or later.  No more windows server 2000!

Servername	IP	Name

• System State

Things that are protected by the system state are listed in the following article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dpm/bb808714.aspx

Servername	OS	Server IP

• Exclusions

Write down the exclusions here.  This can be folder based, File based or File extension based.  Maybe interesting if you don’t want to backup the entire companies MP3 collection ;-)

Think also about the following: If DFS-N is in place (Distributed File Share-Namespace) then map to the actual file locations, because shares through the DFS hierarchy cannot be selected for protection, only the target paths can be selected.  If DFS-R (Replication) is used, the map to all the replicas and then select one of them for protection.

Servername	ServerIP	Excluded folder

 

Servername	ServerIP	Excluded files

 

Servername	Server IP	Excluded file extension

 

Step 3: Create Logical Design for Protection

In this step, the protection requirements will be translated into a logical design.  And that logical design will be configured as one or more protection groups.  But before you start, stop for a moment and consider the following VSS limitations

• File protection to disk is limited to 64 shadow copies
• File protection can have a maximum of 8 scheduled recovery points for each protection group each day
• Application protection to disk is limited to 512 shadow copies, incremental backups are not counted towards this limit

Keep those in mind while designing this step

To do this, you will now need to fill in the next table so you can determine recovery goals, protection media and how the replica’s will be created.

Here is the explanation for the various parameters

Server or workstation: Name of the Server and if it is a server or a workstation
Location: Location of the data
Data to be protected: Application data or File data.
Data Size: Current size of the data
Rate of Change: How fast does the data change?
Protected volume: The name of the protected volume (if applicable)
Synchronization Frequency: How many times do we need to apply the changes to the replica
Retention Range: How long must this data be kept available (online and/or offline)
Recovery Point Schedule: How many time between RPs
Media: Which media is used? (disk or tape or disk/tape)
Replica Creation Method: Automatic or manual (backup/restore)?
Protection group name: Choose a name
DPM Server: Choose the correct DPM server. (If more then 1 server will be in place)

	SQL Production Databases
Server or workstation	SQL1, SQL2, SQL3
Location	Physical Location, eg Antwerp Office
Data to be Protected	Application
Data Source Type	Disk
Data Size	in total, 600 GB, calculated to 1 TB in five years
Rate of Change	Frequent
Protected Volume	SQL Store
Synchronization Frequency	15 min
Retention Range	7 days
Recovery Point Schedule	9.00, 12.00, 15.00, 18.00, 21.00
Media	Disk/Tape
Replica Creation method	Automatic
Protection Group name	SQL Production
DPM Server	DPM01

If you make this map for each of the data you need to backup, you already designed your protection groups.

Step 4: Design the Storage

Here’s the tricky part.  It is almost impossible to correctly calculate how much storage you need.  There are a few helpfull hands on the internet, but most of the time I have seen that taking the complete storage and make it two times that size is good enough.  This is (of course) when you want to use the synchronization features at full.  If you are only interested in the traditional way of backing up, then you can go with less.

Anyway, here are a few links for storage calculation

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795684.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb808859.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2007/10/31/data-protection-manager-2007-storage-calculator.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=445BC0CD-FC93-480D-98F0-3A5FB05D18D0&displaylang=en

• Custom Volumes

Do we need to consider custom volumes?  Only if:

1. Critical data must be manually separated onto a high performance LUN
2. To meet regulatory requirements
3. To separate IO-intensive workloads across multiple spindles

• Choose the Disk Subsystem

If you have an option, decide what you are going to use as disk subsystem.  Will you be using DAS, SAN, iSCSI?  What RAID configuration?  Choose this based on the Peak IOps during backup or restore but in my humble opinion, a good iSCSI solution will do the trick without any problems (Think Dell MD3000i for example…)

• Tape Storage

What tapedrive model or robotic library will you be using?  Is it compliant?

Check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dpm/cc678583.aspx for compliancy

• Placement of Disk and Tape Storage

What is the location of the disk and tape storage towards the DPM server?  Is it close?  Is it network connected, fiber? scsi connected?

Step 5: Design the DPM Server

Finally you are getting to the end of this process.  You can design the DPM server itself.

• calculate how many DPM Servers are needed

These are the limitations of one DPM Server:

1. Maximum 250 storage groups
2. Maximum 10 Tb for 32-bit DPM servers
3. Maximum 45 TB for 64-bit DPM servers
4. Maximum 256 data sources per DPM server (64-bit) where each data source needs two volumes
5. Maximum 128 data sources per DPM server (32-bit)
6. Maximum 8000 VSS shadow copies
7. VSS Addressing limits: Add a DPM server for each 5 TB (32-bit) or 22 TB (64-bit)
8. Maximum 75 protected servers and 150 protected workstations per server
9. Data sources in another domain / forest that is untrusted… Add a new DPM server

• Map protection groups to servers and storage.

Well, as already said, if more then one DPM is in place, map the table to the correct server.  Few pointers here:

1. Separate data that cannot coexist on the same server for legal or compliance reasons
2. Group protection groups that have different synchronization frequencies
3. Group protection groups with the same media requirements
4. Group protection groups that comprise data sources that are within the same high-speed network.
5. Group protection groups that will be backed up from or to VM’s.

• Hardware requirements

According to Microsoft:

What	Minimum	Recommended
Processor	1 Ghz	2.33 Ghz quad-core CPUs
Memory	2 GB	4 GB ram
Pagefile	0.2 % the size of all recovery points + 1.5 times the RAM	N/A
Disk Space	Program Files: 410 MB Database file drive: 900 MB System Drive: 2650 MB	2-3 GB free on the PF volume
Disk Space for Storage Pool	1.5 times the size of the protected data	2-3 times the size of the protected data
Logical Unit Number (LUN)	N/A	Maximum of 17 TB for GPT dynamic disks 2 TB for MBR disks

• Software Requirements

You need to know these 5 things before deciding to place DPM on a server.

1. NO ia64-bit OS
2. NO Microsoft System Center Operations Manager on same server.
3. NO domain controller or application server
4. Windows Server 2008 (Standard & Enterprise Edition)
5. Windows Server 2003 with SP2 (R2)

• Virtual or not?

Yes you can run DPM virtually when you use pass-through disks or iSCSI device.  Please note that you can’t connect to a tape library directly attached to that server at that time.

• Database

Please keep in mind that you need to run the DPM database on a separate SQL instance!  You also need to plan for SSRS to be implemented on each DPM server.  It is necessary, you can’t without.

• Dedicated Network

Will you be using a dedicated network?  If so, write it down.

• Fault Tolerance and protection for DPM

Two components of DPM can be made fault tolerant: The DPM server and the DPM database.  However, keep this in mind for fault tolerance:

1. Server cannot be run as an MSCS clustered application
2. Server can run in a VM, which can be a part of a clustered environment
3. Database is not supported in an MSCS cluster
4. DPM Server can backup its own databases to tape.
5. A DPM Server can be used to protect the data from other DPM Servers.

 

Oke, that’s it.  Before you even started to do something, you have gathered all the information necessary to deploy a good DPM implementation.

It will lower the changes of failure and even (if necessary) point out to the management that additional resources are needed or that you can not deliver the asked business requirements

Cheers,

 

Mike

 

Normal 0 false 21 false false false NL-BE X-NONE X-NONE

 

As mentioned in here the  System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise Licensing has changed since today. Microsoft has developed a transition path from the SCSMSE to the newly SMSD: License Grant: One-time License Grant of System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD) to License Holders of System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE): As a one-time exception in connection with the transition of SMSE* from a suite that allows for the management of any number of OSEs...(read more)

I’m very proud to announce that one of the co-founders of the user-group and friend Kenny Buntinx has been awarded with the prestigious MVP award System Center Configuration Manager!     Congratulations Kenny!   Alexandre Verkinderen...(read more)

Hey All,

If you ever want to change the location where DPM places the backup of a System State, here it is.  Why would you want to do that?  One of the most heard reasons is because you want the backup on another drive for space reasons.  Anyway, here’s how to:

To achieve this, you need to change the PSDataSourceConfig.xml on the protected server.  This can be found on %program files%\dpm\datasources

Change the value between <FilesToProtect></FilesToProtect> to the correct value and save it (By default, this will be %systemdrive%\WindowsImageBackup\*)

After that, do the following things on the DPM server:

1) Run a consistency check (This will fail big time :-))

2) Modify the protected group by running through the wizard (next next till you drop and finish)

3) Run the consistency check again, and it should be solved

That’s it

 

With thanks to Steven for the information

 

Cheers,

Mike

PXE booting in your VM-Environment will not work unless you disable the Trend micro common firewall driver on your physical host . This is a known issue for Trend Micro ! To do this , follow the steps below. Go to your control panel and select your network card . Select your network adapter and select properties. The following screen appears. Deselect the Trend Micro Common firewall driver and select “OK”.It is been disabled now. PXE booting on VMWare Workstation Machine should work from know on...(read more)

In a previous blogpost I already mentioned that Alain Cote has developped a HP EVA performance management pack.   Alain has continued to improve his management pack and wow we have an update with: better discovery a controller processor monitor and a report   You can get the HP EVA performance management pack V2 here .   Thanks Alain for sharing this with the community!   Have fun, Alexandre Verkinderen...(read more)

Tomorrow I am delivering a session about “Thin , Thick or Hybrid Imaging – Notes from the field” at the Community day 2009. After a hectic week , I finally got ready with my demo and my slide deck. I had the luck of destroying my hard drive with all of my demo’s on Tuesday , just after finishing off my configuration. Guess what ! No backup … Finally everything is falling into place , so relax , sit back and enjoy the show for tomorrow!   Hope it helps , Kenny...(read more)

Microsoft just published a known issue with the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Management Pack for Systems Center Operations Manager 2007.   We’ve seen a couple issues with the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Management Pack for Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 that we just released and found that the issues did not impact the operation of the management pack but were generating some non-actionable alerts. As a result, we wanted to make everyone aware of these so they wouldn’t cause any undue concern...(read more)

Recovery off a secondary site is not supported with SCCM , backup it up is !  Only a reinstall is supported for secondary site. This news I received yesterday from PSS support , after we ran into an issue with the VSS Backup writer at a customer.I did not know it wasn't supported , as the functionality is there to configure it. Why don't they block this possibility on secondary sites if recovery is not supported. But , I do agree there is not much on a secondary site of value to back...(read more)

Carol Bailey has written an article about values to set for the key sizes and validity periods for the certificates required for native mode and out of band management in Configuration Manager that I want to share with you.  Carol said : This has been a tough one for me to answer, because in the main, these values are external to Configuration Manager and they are PKI design questions with advantages and disadvantages for different values.  The higher the key size, the more secure the certificate...(read more)

Microsoft released a Operations Manager 2007 R2 SCW Roles and Hardening guide help protect and harden your Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment. The Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 R2 Security Hardening Guide for Windows Server 2008 is designed to provide you with essential information about how to further protect, or harden, your Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment by using the Security Configuration Wizard (SCW). SCW is now automatically installed with Windows Server 2008. SCW is an attack...(read more)

Alain Côté has written his own HP EVA management pack!   This Management pack will monitor the performance of an HP EVA, the official HP Storage MP only does alerting.    This Management pack is based on the evaperf.exe command and has several collection rules, diagnostic task and one monitor for the latency. The management pack assumes evaperf.exe is in C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\EVA Performance Monitor and is configured properly.       Thanks to Alain Côté for...(read more)

The new Exchange Server 2007 management pack for Opsmgr 2007 R2 is now RTM and available from the mp catalog ! New monitoring wizard for configuring the Exchange MP:     Feature Summary A number of synthetic transactions ensure the Exchange servers are available and responding in a timely manner. The synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, so that if the target of a transaction is in maintenance mode, the source will not run the transaction, and not alert unnecessarily. This...(read more)

On some occasions the scom agent can cause a lot of performance issues on the servers. Here I will describe some steps I take when I have performance problems and in most of the cases it works for me. The first thing you should do is to configure the antivirus exclusions for opsmgr. Have a look at Kevin Holman’s blogpost Antivirus Exclusions for MOM and OpsMgr on how to do this. Configuring anti virus exlusions will help you gain some performance. This is a screenshot of the performance of...(read more)

If you have performance problems on your agents it’s probably the healthservice.exe that’s taking a lot of processor time %. At the moment only the processor time of the healthservice of the management servers is collected. This mean you will need to create a new collection performance rule to collect the processor time of the healthservice on your agents. To have an overview of the processor time % of the healthservice.exe of all your agents follow the following procedure. Create a collection...(read more)

The product team just announced that SCVMM 2008 R2 is publicly released. Have a look at my previous post to know what changes in SCVMM 2008 R2 You can download SCVMM 2008 R2 from connect.microsoft.com...(read more)

FYi   Components of Server Management Suite Enterprise Enterprise server management licences<Server MLs> for · System Center Operations Manager 2007, · System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, · System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 · System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 · And System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Management Server License Current licensing Rules: Rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments (OSEs) on a single physical server...(read more)

SCUG.BE interviewed Jeremy Chapman (Senior Product Manager in the Windows client enterprise team) on windows 7 deployment: Have Fun, SCUG.BE crew...(read more)

SESSION RECORDING Using System Center Operations Manager to monitor your SharePoint environment System Center Operations Manager 2007 is THE end to end Monitoring Solution. In this session we will discuss what you, as SharePoint guys, find relevant to be monitored. System Center Operations Manager uses a SharePoint Monitoring toolkit for monitoring the SharePoint Environment. This toolkit consists of a set of System Center Operations Manager 2007 management packs designed to help IT pros monitor...(read more)

Interview Nigel Cain at Techdays 2009 in Antwerp: Have fun, Scug.be Team...(read more)

SCUG.BE interviewed THE Jeff Wettlaufer at Techdays 2009 in Antwerp! Have Fun, The SCUG.BE Team...(read more)

Today I wanted to install my OperationsmanagerDB on my SQL cluster 2005 SP2 actif-passive. So I started the DBCreatewizard.exe and I got a very strange error mentioning something about Severity: Error Message: Database creation failed. The database might have been incompletly created or modified. System.InvalidOperationException: An error occurred while trying to create the database on your SQL Server. Check your logs for more information. at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Setup.DBCreateWizard.Program...(read more)

I had troubles with the Opmsgr Console performance at serveral clients. One of the most important things to boost your console performance is to reduce the Opsmgr DB size. If you want to know which tabel is taking most of your DB size run the following query: Simple query to display large tables, to determine what is taking up space in the database: SELECT so.name, 8 * Sum(CASE WHEN si.indid IN (0, 1) THEN si.reserved END) AS data_kb, Coalesce(8 * Sum(CASE WHEN si.indid NOT IN (0, 1, 255) THEN si...(read more)

When you want to start upgrading your consoles from the opmsgr 2007 R2 RC version to the Opsmgr 2007 R2 RTM version be carefull with: third party extensions like the Savision live maps for example. You will first need to uninstall the extensions and reinstall them afterwarts. You can download the extensions from http://savision.com/downloads Also check that no opmsgr 2007 agents are installed on the same box. You will need to uninstall the agents prior to be able to upgrade the console   Next...(read more)

ConfigMgr 2007 R2 Hi All, In 2 weeks I will be teaching a ConfigMgr 2007 class, this will be the first time I teach the class with modified content for ConfigMgr 2007 R2. This class will run at jcacademy in Leuven. More details can be found here: http://www.jcacademy.be/courses/_nl/coursesheet.asp?language=NL&country=&course_id=738 But to summarize this is a 5 day class covering the skills upgrade for current sms 2003 admins to ConfigMgr 2007 R2. Runs from the 8 th till the 12 th of June...(read more)

I’ve several production environmnets running the Opmsgr 2007 R2 Release Candidate version. Now that the Opsmgr 2007 R2 Rtm is available I wanted to test the upgrade from RC to RTM in my lab environment before upgrading my production environments. Start the SetupOM.exe   the setup will detect that you run on “older” version of opsmgr2007 The prerequisiter check failed because of the savision livemaps RC extensions:   Uninstall the savision rc extensions and your ready to go:   After...(read more)

We just moved from the old news servers to the new social forum platform! So start asking your questions, issues, share your knowledge etc on the new platform and make it as good as the old NNTP groups! http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager grtz, ALexandre Verkinderen http://scug.be...(read more)

SCOM 2007 R2 is RTM! Download the scom 2007 R2 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=93ddf25b-1ef0-4851-81b0-5fb9a2f76181 Brief Description Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 delivers end-to-end service management of applications and IT services running across the Windows, UNIX and Linux servers in your datacenter. System Requirements Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP For the...(read more)