Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 2

Update Edit March 2012: This post has been updated to reflect the release of the new DPM 2012 RTM build and supersedes the references to the BETA build that was originally written about.


In Part 1 of this series, I walked through the pre-requisites needed and installation process to upgrade an existing System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 server to the System Center Data Protection Manager 2012.


In this post I will explain how to upgrade your DPM 2012 agents to the new DPM 2012 agent as well as demonstrate what is needed to get all of your upgraded DPM 2010 protection groups back into a healthy state after the upgrade has finished.

Double click on your new DPM 2012 shortcut and you will be presented with the new DPM 2012 Administrator Console like the window below. You can navigate around DPM 2012 by using the menu buttons on the left hand side of the screen

Upgrading the DPM 2010 Agents

To upgrade the DPM 2010 agents, we need to first click on the ‘Management’ tab from the Wunderbar on the left hand side and straight away, we should be presented with the ‘Agents’ screen showing which agents need to be upgraded to DPM 2012. If the 'Disks' or 'Libraries' screens open instead, simply click on the 'Agents' menu on the left to access the protected agents screen.

From this screen we can automatically update any agents that have been installed on machines that are based in the same Active Directory domain as the new DPM 2012 server. Just click on the ‘Update Available’ link to begin the agent update and click on ‘Yes’ from the resultant window

 

You should now see the upgrading progress with a percentage of how much is complete from the ‘Agent Status’ column

Once the update is complete, you should see a status of ‘OK’ in the ‘Agent Status’ column beside your servers. DPM 2012 is also clever enough to know that if you are upgrading an agent on a server that is a member of a Microsoft Failover Cluster, then it will automatically upgrade the agent on all members of the cluster at the same time!

If you have DPM 2010 agents installed on servers that are not members of an Active Directory that is trusted by the DPM 2012 server, you will need to manually upgrade these agents individually. When you click on the ‘Update Available’ link for these untrusted domain servers, you will see the following error

To upgrade these untrusted domain agents, we need to manually copy and then run the DPM 2012 agent installer files from the DPM 2012 server to each untrusted domain server that needs to be protected with DPM.

To do this, copy the DPM Remote Agent installation files from the following location

C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\ProtectionAgents\RA

to a location the untrusted domain server’s C:\ drive

Now, from the untrusted domain server, open an elevated permissions command prompt and browse to the location of the newly copied DPM 2012 agent files. Once you are in the relevant folder for your Server architecture – i.e. i386 for 32 Bit or amd64 for 64 Bit servers, run the ‘DPMAgentInstaller_x64.exe’ executable

Once it’s complete, you should see the following confirmation window

Now go back to the DPM 2012 Administrator Console, open the ‘Management’ tab from the left hand Wunderbar, click on the 'Agents' link to see all of your protected computers and then right mouse click on the untrusted domain server agent reference that you have just upgraded manually and click on the ‘Refresh’ option to refresh the view

You should now see an agent status of ‘OK’ beside your untrusted domain server agent – easy!

Repeat this process for all of your remaining agents that need to be upgraded before you continue onto the final overall upgrade steps of your DPM 2012 server.

Once all of your DPM 2010 agents – both trusted domain and untrusted domain – have been upgraded to DPM 2012 and show an agent status of ‘OK’, you can then go to the ‘Protection’ tab from within the DPM 2012 Administrator Console to view all of your existing Protection Groups

Make sure you have the ‘Protection Group’ view enabled from the ‘Group By’ section at the top of the window and then right mouse click on each protection group and select the ‘Perform Consistency Check’ option from the flash out menu as the screen below shows

This is a really neat feature in DPM  that allows us to now perform a consistency check on a whole protection group in one click!

Select ‘Yes’ to begin the consistency check on all members of the protection group

Repeat this process with all of your protection groups and once the consistency check is finished, you should have a healthy state showing on them all and you're ready to start using DPM 2012!

This completes the upgrade process of System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012.

If you want to learn more about DPM 2012 and its integration into SCOM, then have a read of my series of posts on:

Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM