Diary of a Techie

The book “Mastering Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007″ by devin L. Ganger and Ryan Femling is a great resource for those starting to use DPM 2007. However, before you start to explore DPM2007, please note that the book fails to highlight the fact that DPM2007 does not back up or protect servers that are not members of your active directory domain. The same is equally true for non windows OS.

Here are some additional information that will compliment the materials in the book:
1. Firewalls in place on the backup domain controller prevented the proper installation of the agent.
Some of the ports that must be open for DPM agent to work: DCOM (135/TCP Dynamic), DPM Data Channel (5718/TCP 5719/TCP) DNS (53/UDP) Kerberos (88/UDP 88/TCP) LDAP (389/TCP 389/UDP) NetBIOS (137/UDP 138/UDP 139/TCP 445/TCP)

2. Hotfix must be applied to the target computers before the DPM agent is installed.
Before you install protection agents on the computers you are going to protect, you must apply hotfix 940349. For more details, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 940349, ” Availability of a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) update rollup package for Windows Server 2003 to resolve some VSS snapshot issues” (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=99034).

3. Even when the DPM agent was installed, creating “protection groups” will fails due to “pre-requisite software not installed”
I had to install the 2 hotfixes and enable Powershell (with .net 2.0) for the “create protection groups” to move forward. Really a very manual step.

4. There was no discussion of licensing terms for “standard” and “Enterprise”
Basically, “standard” license is for basic backup of files, folders and system state, but for backup of sql, sharepoint, exchange, other DPM servers, you need an “Enterprise license”

Some more mysteries I am researching concerns the failure to add an agent to a master domain controller. It refuses by saying that the domain credentials are not valid. Although the account supplied is verified to be coorect and is the admin account for the domain.

Filed under: Computing