New MVP Authored Book on System Center DPM 2012 SP1

In the last few days, a new book has been released called 'Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1' that was authored by some friends of mine in the System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management (SC CDM) MVP group.

The Team

Here's a quick bio of each of the guys involved in the book (it's a "who's-who" of the DPM System Center community):

Steve Buchanan (Author)
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP and an infrastructure consultant at RBA with a focus on System Center. Steve authored System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010 SP1 and was a technical reviewer for the System Center Service Manager 2012 Cookbook and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Cookbook, Packt Publishing. He can be found blogging at www.buchatech.com and on Twitter as @buchatech.


Islam Gomaa (Author)
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP and a System Architect at Kivuto Solutions Inc. Islam has over 15 years of expertise in helping organizations align their business goals using Microsoft technology and deploying Microsoft-based solutions. He can be found blogging at http://blog.islamgomaa.com/ and on Twitter as @IslamGomaa.


Robert Hedblom (Author)
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP and works as a Solution Architect for System Center for hosters, EPG, and SMB customers globally. He was previously an MVP for DPM. Robert's knowledge is often used by Microsoft as a reviewing partner and consultant via Microsoft Consultant Services (MCS) or Premier Field Engineers (PFE) on a global scale. He can be found blogging at http://robertanddpm.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @RobertandDPM.


Flemming Riis (Author)
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP and is an infrastructure consultant at Kompetera with a focus on System Center. He has been working there since 1997 in various roles, starting with repairing PCs and then presales support. He is now a consultant who started with management software, then became Operations Manager, and hasn't looked back since. He can be found blogging at http://flemmingriis.com/ and on Twitter as @FlemmingRiis.


Mike Resseler (Reviewer)
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP and is a Product Strategy Specialist for Veeam. Mike is focused on technologies around Hyper-V and System Center. His major hobby is discussing and developing solid Disaster Recovery scenarios. You can also follow Mike on Twitter @MikeResseler and through his blog at  http://scug.be/mike/.


Yegor Startsev (Reviewer)
Is a System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP from Samara, Russia. Yegor has worked in the IT industry for over 11 years, starting as a systems administrator and working up to his current role as a Chief Information Officer at VTS. He is a regular speaker at regional Microsoft and IT Pro community events. Yegor also runs a blog at http://ystartsev.wordpress.com.


Review

The book is a walkthrough of the latest version of Microsoft's flagship backup offering Data Protection Manager (DPM) and is a must-read for anyone looking to up-skill in this area. I've had the RAW e-book format of this book purchased for some time now and that meant that I could read through the book while it was still a work-in-progress over the last few months. I took another look at the final book over the weekend and have to say that as someone who has extensive DPM knowledge, I still managed to pick up a few tips and tricks from the guys real world experience notes.

There's loads of content around backing up Microsoft workloads and non-Microsoft workloads along with integration to SCOM, ConfigMgr and Orchestrator. If you want to learn how to make use of Azure to backup to cloud, then there's a chapter for that too!

All-in-all, an excellent book and well worth a read for anyone working on or considering working on SC DPM 2012 SP1.


Where Can You Get It?

You can get your hands on it today from here:

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1

Failed Cluster While Backing Up Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V CSV's

Last week I had the opportunity to do something other than SCOM and get my hands dirty with a new Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V cluster project for one of our customers.

The build went well and I used the excellent Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide book along with this blog post on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Best Practices (In Easy Checklist Form) to double and then triple check all was deployed to best practice recommendations.

After we P2V'd a number of the customers physical machines and configured the DPM 2012 SP1 backup application to perform host-level backups (i.e. backing up the entire virtual machine while it's still running using the agent deployed to a Hyper-V host), we started seeing problems with performance on the cluster nodes and then ultimately inside each virtual machine running on the cluster.

Leaving the cluster in this state resulted in both hosts becoming unresponsive and everything grinding to a halt. We had to power cycle down the SAN (FC connected HP) and both hosts to get everything back online - not cool :(

So, after a small bit of searching for an answer we came across the following two recently released Hotfixes from Microsoft that needed to be applied to the Hyper-V hosts:

• Update improves cluster resiliency in Windows Server 2012 (KB2848344)
• Can't access a resource that is hosted on a Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012-based failover cluster (KB2838043)

When I spoke with some of my MVP buddies about this particular issue, I was pointed in the direction of this excellent script from Hans Vredevoort over at Hyper-V.nu:

Updated: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Cluster Hotfixes and Updates

This script can be run against your Windows Server 2012 hosts to report on any missing hotfixes or updates that should be applied. Although we thought we had deployed all the relevant updates to our customers cluster, once we ran the script it was apparent that there were a few more that still needed to be added in.

Edit: Microsoft's Cristian Edwards has mentioned in his comment below that there are some additional and updated scripts that you can also use to ensure you keep your Hyper-V hosts up to date. Check out his updated blog post here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/cedward/archive/2013/05/31/validating-hyper-v-2012-and-failover-clustering-hotfixes-with-powershell-part-2.aspx

Conclusion

If you're running a Hyper-V 2012 cluster and are using ANY backup application (not just specifically DPM 2012 SP1) that performs host-level backups of virtual machines located on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV's), then I'd highly recommend you install the above two hotfixes at least and then also run Hans' script to see what else you need to get deployed.

With the hotfixes applied to the environment, it works perfectly now!

DPM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this short series on DPM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM, I detailed the pre-upgrade tasks that need to be carried out to prepare your DPM 2012 environment for upgrading to Service Pack 1 (SP1) along with the steps required to get your primary DPM 2012 management server upgraded. This post will go through the final steps of the upgrade deployment process to ensure that your agents, secondary DPM servers and backed up data are all running smoothly after the upgrade.

Upgrading the Agents

Once the upgrade of SP1 is complete on your primary DPM 2012 server, you will then need to update any DPM agents that you have deployed in your environment. To do this, open the DPM 2012 SP1 console and click on the Management tab from the wunderbar and then click on the Agents link to display a list of all your agents awaiting upgrade as shown below.

When you click on the Update Available link beside an agent, you will be presented with the following window asking you to confirm if you want to proceed with upgrading the agent to SP1. Click Yes to begin the agent upgrade process.

Once the agent update process completes, you should then be able to verify the SP1 upgrade by confirming that the version of the Protection Agent is set to 4.1.3313.0 as shown below

You might also notice from the Agents list that one or two servers have a status of Restart Pending beside them. These will need to be restarted before you can backup data from them and any downtime due to this will need to be planned for as part of your maintenance schedule.

Run a Manual Consistency Check on Protected Data

Once the primary server and the agents have all been upgraded, you will now need to run a manual consistency check on all of your protection groups. This for me forms the longest part of DPM upgrades when in production environments as the more data you have being backed up, the longer these manual consistency checks will take.

To run the consistency checks, open up the DPM 2012 SP1 console and navigate to the Protection tab in the wunderbar. Once here, you will see that all of your protection groups are in an inconsistent state. Simply right-mouse click on a protection group and then choose the Perform a Consistency Check option from the resulting menu as shown below to kick off a consistency check of replica's contained in that protection group.

Repeat this task on all protection groups until they are all returned to a healthy state.

Upgrade Stand-Alone Consoles

If you have deployed the DPM 2012 console onto any other servers in your environment (such as to support integration with System Center 2012 Orchestrator for example), you will need to first uninstall the Microsoft System Center 2012 - DPM Remote Administration application from the computer before deploying the upgraded SP1 version.

To uninstall the stand-alone console, logon to the server with an administrative account, click Start and type appwiz.cpl as below. 

Now hit Enter to open the Programs and Features applet, find the Microsoft System Center 2012 - DPM Remote Administration program from the list, right-mouse click on it and then choose the Uninstall option to remove it as below

Once you have uninstalled the previous version, browse to the location that you have extracted/mounted the DPM 2012 SP1 media to and then with an administrative account, right-mouse click on the Setup executable and choose the Run As Administrator option to begin the installation

From the Installation splash screen, choose the DPM Remote Administration link as shown below

Accept the licence agreement and click OK

Click Next from the Welcome screen

When all the prerequisites have passed, click Next to move on

Choose your installation location, then click Next to continue

Select your Microsoft Update option and then hit the Install button to begin the SP1 installation of the Remote Administration feature

When the installer is finished, you should see the screen below telling you that it has been successful and you can then hit the Close button to finish

Finally, open up the newly installed stand-alone console, choose the DPM server that you wish to connect with and then ensure that the title bar of the console references Service Pack 1 as below.

Upgrade the Secondary DPM Servers

If you have deployed any additional DPM 2012 servers as a secondary or disaster recovery solution (a DPM server that is backing up another DPM server), then you will also need to run the SP1 upgrade on these. The process is identical to the steps you would have already followed up to this point but for reference, here are the steps again:

On the Secondary Server:

• Close Administrator Console and Management Shell
• Carry out the tasks in the Upgrade Primary DPM Server section in Part 1 of this series
• Upgrade any protection agents on the secondary server by following the Upgrading the Agents section earlier in this post
• Run a consistency check on all protected data by following the steps in the Run a Manual Consistency Check on Protected Data section earlier in this post

Post Upgrade Tasks

So we're just about finished the SP1 upgrade of DPM 2012 and all that's left to do is to carry out a few quick tasks/checks - some of which may not be applicable to every environment.

• If you have previously configured tape library sharing and had to remove it as part of the initial pre-upgrade tasks for SP1, you can now go ahead and reconfigure it again using the How to Setup Tape Library Sharing link on TechNet for information.
• If you had SCVMM Hyper-V Live Migration configured before doing the upgrade, you must run Set-DpmGlobalProperty -KnownVmmServers <VmmServerName> to continue protection
• If you were protecting system state and you have customized the location of the backup that is staged, this customization will be lost in the PSdataSourceConfig.xml file during the upgrade. The staging location will be set to the drive with the largest available disk space. This will need to be reconfigured again.

Conclusion

That should be all you need to do now to upgrade DPM 2012 to Service Pack 1. Ensure that you refer back to the 'Upgrade Sequencing for System Center 2012 SP1'. guide to ensure that you upgrade any other System Center 2012 products in the correct order.

DPM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM (Part 1)

At long last the final Release To Manufacturing (RTM) version bits of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for System Center 2012 are generally available (GA). 

This Service Pack has been highly anticipated as it not only delivers the customary bug fixes that are to be expected with any such release , but it also brings a large number of new exciting feature additions and enhancements.

This post is one of a number of posts that I've been working on to help people get upgraded to System Center 2012 Service Pack 1. You can check out my other posts here:

• SCOM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM (Part 1)
• SCOM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM (Part 2)
• SCOM 2012 - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM (Part 3)
• System Center 2012 Orchestrator (SCORCH) - Installing Service Pack 1 RTM

Update February 2013 - If you want to be in with a chance of winning a copy of our Mastering System Center 2012 Operations Manager book, then check out the link below to see what you need to do:

Win a Copy of Mastering SCOM 2012 by Evaluating System Center


Be aware that System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 contains updates for the whole suite of products and not just Data Protection Manager (DPM) and it's advised that you follow a particular upgrade sequence of each product as per this warning:

If you are planning to upgrade two or more System Center components, it is imperative that you first consult the guide 'Upgrade Sequencing for System Center 2012 SP1'. The order in which you perform component upgrades is important. Failure to follow the correct upgrade sequence might result in component failure for which no recovery options exist

If you are happy enough with your product upgrade sequence and are now ready to start the DPM 2012 RTM upgrade to Service Pack 1, then this blog post will detail the pre and post SP1 upgrade tasks that you need to consider along with walking you through the deployment of SP1 to your DPM server infrastructure.

Some of the information contained in this post will be taken directly from the accompanying 'DPM2012_UpgradeSP1' guide from Microsoft.

DPM 2012 Service Pack 1 Enhancements

The following list contains some of the enhancements that SP1 brings to System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager (DPM 2012):

• Improved backup performance of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V over CSV 2.0 deployments
• Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) provide a distributed file access solution so that multiple nodes in the cluster can simultaneously access the same NTFS file system

In System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) DPM, CSV 2.0 support allows the following benefits:

• 900% improvement in expressful backups
• Parallel backups
• No performance difference between backups from owner and non-owner nodes
• Support for SMB shares
• Protect Hyper-V over remote SMB share

In System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) DPM, SMB shares support allows the following benefits:

• More efficient expressful backups
• Continued protection even after Live Migration
• Support for SMB shares in standalone and scaled-out deployments

DPM now allows you to exclude virtual machine pagefiles from incremental backups to improve usage of storage and improve backup performance

• Scale out support for Hyper-V virtual machines
• Protect Windows 8 deduplicated volumes
• Support for Live Migration
• Integration with Windows Azure Online Backup
• Support for protecting file server data
• Support for protecting virtual machines
• Support for protecting SQL Server 2012 databases that use the AlwaysOn feature
• You can use a stand-alone instance of SQL Server 2012 to host the DPM database
• Support for protecting file server using Resilient File System (ReFS)
• Support for protecting SharePoint 2013
• Support for protecting Exchange Server 2013

Upgrading From DPM 2010

Also, before we kick off, it's worth pointing out that although you can perform an in-place upgrade of Service Pack 1 from an existing DPM 2012 RTM installation, you CANNOT upgrade directly from DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 SP1. Instead you must first upgrade DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 and then perform an in-place upgrade.

If you are running DPM 2010 and want to deploy DPM 2012 Service Pack 1, you can check out these old posts of mine to get you started:

• Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 1
• Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 2

High-Level Overview

Here's a high-level overview of what's involved to get your DPM 2012 environment upgraded to SP1:

1. Accomplish Pre-Upgrade Tasks
2. Upgrade Primary DPM Servers
3. Push Install Upgrade to Agents/ Upgrade Manually Installed Agents
4. Run a Manual Consistency Check on Protected Data
5. Upgrade any Stand-Alone Remote Administration Consoles
6. Upgrade Secondary DPM Servers
7. Accomplish Post-Upgrade Tasks
8. Return to the Upgrade Sequencing Guide

Pre-Upgrade Tasks

• Install the latest DPM hotfixes on the DPM server and protected computers (Cumulative Update 3 KB 2751230 is the most recent). For the latest updates and hotfixes for DPM, see Downloads for System Center Data Protection Manager.
• Ensure that the hard disk on which DPM is installed has at least 4.5 gigabytes (GB) of free disk space
• You must back up the DPM database and save the backup file in a secure location. For obvious reasons, don't use DPM to backup it's own database prior to upgrading!
• If you have library sharing enabled, you must first disable library sharing and then backup your DPM dataset. You can enable tape library sharing after installing DPM successfully. For more information, see Removing Library Sharing on TechNet.
• If you are upgrading your instance of SQL Server to SQL Server 2012, it's recommended to install a new instance of SQL Server 2012 before proceeding with the upgrade. For step-by-step instructions for installing a remote instance of SQL Server, see Installing a Remote Instance of SQL Server 2008
• Then migrate your database using the steps outlined in Remote SQL Server instance to Remote SQL Server instance
• If you are also upgrading your operating system to Windows Server 2012, you must enable the Deduplication role.

Upgrade Primary DPM Server

Note 1

If you want to use a remote SQL instance, run the DPM Setup.exe installer on the remote SQL Server and select the DPM Remote SQL Prep tool option from the Setup page. For more information on upgrading DPM database, see the Upgrading the DPM Database article on Technet.

To begin the SP1 upgrade, logon to your DPM 2012 Management Server with an administrative account and then browse to the location that you have mounted or extracted your DPM 2012 SP1 RTM media to. Now right-mouse click on 'Setup' and choose the 'Run As Administrator' option as shown below

From the splash screen, choose the Data Protection Manager link to begin

Click to accept the license terms and conditions, then hit OK

If you haven't installed Cumulative Update/Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 to DPM, then you will be presented with the error message below. To upgrade first to CU3, see Downloads for System Center Data Protection Manager.

If you have deployed CU3, then you will see the Welcome screen of the DPM 2012 Setup wizard. Click Next to continue

If you are performing an upgrade of the locally installed SQL instance that runs DPM, then from the Prerequisites Check window, choose the top option as shown below. If you are installing onto a remote SQL server, then you will select the bottom option. Once you have made your selection, click the Check and Install button to move on

When the check has completed, you will be given a final warning to ensure that you have your DPM SQL databases backed up. Click Next to continue

From the Product Registration screen, input your System Center 2012 product key and then click Next

Either choose where you want to install the database files or leave as the default settings, then click Next

At the Security Settings window, enter a password that you are going to use for the DPM SQL Server service account, then click Next

Select whether or not you want to Opt In to use Microsoft Update and then click Next to continue

Choose a setting for the CEIP and then click the Upgrade button to begin the upgrade

Note 2
I had a problem when deploying this upgrade initially to my production DPM 2012 server and halfway through the installation, I was presented with Error ID 820 as the screen below shows. If you come across this issue, take a look at this link for assistance in resolving the problem. For my environment, as I had performed numerous in-place upgrades of DPM over the last couple of years, the installation was strangely failing because the SQL Agent Service for DPM2010 wasn't running. When I started this service and re-ran the upgrade, everything worked as expected!

Once the upgrade finishes successfully, you will be presented with the screen below. Click Close to exit the wizard.

Conclusion

This completes the upgrade to SP1 of your primary DPM 2012 server. In Part 2, I'll walk through the final steps required to completely upgrade your Service Pack 1 deployment.

Download the (BETA) IPD Guide for DPM 2012

Admittedly, I'm a little bit slow putting this particular post up (the arrival of a new baby seriously messes up your time schedules) but nonetheless, it's worth giving a mention to the recent release of the Open BETA Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide for System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager (DPM 2012).

The IPD guides are invaluable when designing a technology solution for your clients or own internal business and are the first port of call for me anytime I'm carrying out a new type of deployment for our customers.

The guide is over 50 pages long and deep dives into a design process which gets broken into different steps depending on your requirements and each of these steps are then further complemented with tasks that require actions to help you through the entire process.

Don't be fooled into thinking that DPM 2012 is just a simple backup product and that it can be installed and configured in a matter of a couple of hours (I hear this a lot from consultants). Although DPM 2012 is certainly one of the quicker products to deploy from the System Center 2012 suite, it's imperative that you scope and plan your deployments properly, otherwise you will soon find yourself running out of disk space or lacking when it comes to untrusted domain (e.g. DMZ) server backups.

This guide will walk you through all of the scenarios you need to successfully deploy DPM 2012 and includes considerations for integrating DPM 2012 with SCOM 2012 by using the new Central Console functionality.

As the guide has just been recently released as a BETA, you will need to access it through the Microsoft Connect site and if you haven't registered here, will need to do so first. Better still, you should sign up for the IPD BETA program here and this will give you access to any future BETA IPD guides that get released.

The benefits of using the Connect site is that you can make comments and requests on the content of the BETA guide and if enough people make the same requests, then it's possible that the final release of the guide will have your changes included.

Here's the link to register and download the IPD Guide for System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager (BETA)

https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=7925

Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 1

This is the first of many of System Center 2012 blog posts that I'm planning on writing over the next few months and I think it's only right that I start with one of the first System Center products that I began working with back a few years ago when it was System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007.

This backup offering from Microsoft has come a long way since those heady days of being simply a 'Microsoft backup product for Microsoft products'!

When I think back to the DPM 2007 application, I recall that, pre-Service Pack 1, it hadn't even got support for Hyper-V - although this was also in it's infancy in relation to where its at today!

A few years back, the company I worked for - CDSoft - who have now been acquired by the company I currently work for - Ergo Group Ireland - built up our System Center skillset and practice by implementing DPM 2007 SP1 along with the new Hyper-V virtualization application that came with Windows Server 2008 RTM. Although we found DPM 2007 SP1 to be an excellent brick-level backup product and a really good standalone Hyper-V host backup product, it was still lacking  when Windows Server 2008 R2 came along with Failover Cluster support and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV's).

Late in 2009 we started hearing about DPM 2010 which had full support for Hyper-V R2 CSV's along with hardware based VSS snapshots and much better performance results. DPM 2010 is the most widespread and 'in-production ' version of Microsoft's backup offering and it's nearly a perfect fit for any Small to Medium Enterprise customers who have Hyper-V R2 installed in their environment - the type of customer that we see a lot of over here in Ireland!

With DPM 2012, Microsoft have really improved on it's performance and extensibility, along with now having a really tight knit integration with the other System Center products- most notably System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

In the last couple of weeks I have found that it is possible to perform an in-place upgrade from DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 BETA to DPM 2012 RC to DPM 2012 RTM. Microsoft don't support the upgrade to RTM from the BETA or RC releases but will of course support the upgrade of DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 RTM.

As a result of this upgrade path, the following few blog posts will offer a guide to upgrading an existing System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 installation that has active trusted and untrusted domain agents deployed, along with protection groups that are fully populated from a production environment.

Edit Update May 2012: I've decided to update this post to reflect the upgrade process of DPM 2010 to the DPM 2012 RTM build as some of the references and screenshots to the BETA build - of which this series was originally written - are now defunct.

Upgrade Pre-Requisites

Before starting the actual upgrade, it’s always a good idea to take a backup of the DPMDB SQL database of your DPM 2010 server before beginning the DPM 2012 upgrade. In most instances, your DPM server is not going to be a virtual machine and as such, we have to revert back to the more traditional methods of ensuring we can recover if things don’t work out as planned with your upgrade!

You can back up the DPM 2010 SQL database quickly using the SQL Server Management Studio to logon to the SQL instance.

You can then right mouse click on your DPMDB database and choose the ‘Tasks’ and then ‘Back up’ flash out menus like the screenshot below

From the next screen, select a location for the backup of the database (or leave the default if you wish) and then select ‘OK

Once this is complete, you can close the SQL Server Management Studio window and proceed with the DPM 2012 upgrade

Below is some important information taken from the ‘System Center 2012 Data Protection manager Help’ document that you need to be aware of prior to starting the upgrade:

Important Information:

• If you are upgrading an existing installation of DPM, the registry key for DS Collocation Factor is retained if it was modified by you and does not get reset.
• Click Ignore on any pop-up dialog boxes that appear during upgrade.
• If your Express Full backups for SQL Server databases are transferring large amounts of data (almost the size of the primary MDF file), you must install the update KB2471430 on the SQL Server. This typically happens after you have run DBCC CHECKDB on a Windows 2008 server.
• Note that DPM 2012 will only run on Windows Server 2008 (R1) or higher
• You MUST install the latest QFE rollup for DPM 2010 onto all of your DPM 2010 servers first and then once the update has been installed, you must push out the update to your protected servers that DPM 2010 is currently protecting.

You can download the latest QFE rollup for DPM 2010 from here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2465832

Edit February 2012: There is an additional hotfix that you will now need to download and install as part of your upgrade to DPM 2012. This hotfix (KB 2615782) enables interoperability between DPM 2010 and the latest DPM 2012 build. You can download it from the following link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2615782

When you have backed up your DPMDB database, installed the QFE rollup to your DPM 2010 servers and reviewed the important information above, you can download the DPM 2012 installer to continue

Download the DPM 2012 Evaluation from the link below, otherwise you can use the full build media that you are entitled to under licence from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/evaluate/trial-software.aspx

Extract the contents of the DPM 2012 zip file to a location on the C drive of your DPM 2010 server.

This will give you two folders similar to the screenshot below

 

 

 

The ‘CC_x86_setup’ folder is the 32bit Central Console installer that enables you to install the new DPM console onto your x86 Windows 7 client machine if you wanted to

We will be using the ‘SCDPM' folder to carry out our upgrade

Double click on the ‘SCDPM' folder , right mouse click on the ‘setup.msi' installer file and select the ‘Run As Administrator’ option to run the installer with elevated rights

That will open the DPM 2012 splash screen as below. You can click on the ‘Run the Pre Requisite Checker’ option that will take you to a Technet article outlining all you need to know to confirm all your pre-requisites are in place for a smooth installation.

This blog post will assume that your original DPM 2012 installation is operating on a physical DPM 2010 server with the SQL role co-located on the same hardware using the default DPM 2010 SQL installation options. If you have your DPM 2010 installation on a remote SQL instance, or even want to move to a new remote SQL instance now, then this is a supported process with the upgrade and it is covered in more detail with the accompanying DPM 2012 documentation

Click on ‘Data Protection Manager’ to continue

 
Accept the licence and click on ‘OK’

From the ‘Data Protection Manager Setup Wizard’ window, click on ‘Next’

From the next window, leave the ‘Use the dedicated instance of SQL Server’ option enabled and click on the ‘Check and Install’ button to carry out a simple ‘pre-requisite’ check on your DPM SQL installation

Leave the defaults enabled from the next screen and click ‘Next’

At the next screen, input your licence key for System Center 2012 RTM and then click 'Next'

Type in the password for your DPM SQL service account and click ‘Next’ again

From the next screen, select the option to enable Microsoft Automatic Updates and then click ‘Next’ again

Select your option for the CEI Program and then click on the ‘Upgrade’ button (you should only see ‘Upgrade’ if you are performing an upgrade of DPM 2010 and all the pre-requisites have been met

Now let the upgrade wizard do its thing

If all goes according to plan, then you should see the screen below confirming successful upgrade of DPM 2010

Once you click on the ‘Close’ button, you will then be presented with the following window requesting that you reboot your DPM server to complete the installation

Click ‘OK’ and then reboot the server

When your server has rebooted, you will notice that your DPM 2010 desktop shortcut has changed to a nice new DPM 2012 one!!

In Part 2 of this short series, I will demonstrate what needs to be carried out to get your protected server agents - both trusted domain based and non-trusted domain based upgraded to the DPM 2012 agent files. I will also explain what needs to be done to ensure your existing protection groups are synchronized and fully up to date without having to modify or recreate them.