System Center 2019 is now Generally Available!

Following on from last weeks post, Microsoft has just announced the General Availability release of System Center 2019.

This release is part of the long term servicing channel (LTSC) license model and comes with a support bandwidth of 10 years.

With full support for Windows Server 2019 across the stack, here's some of the additional capabilities that you get with System Center 2019:

• VMM integration with Azure Update Management for simplified patching of virtual machines.
• Better SCOM integration with Azure services such as Service Map to create automatic Distributed Application models based on server dependencies.
• Azure Management Pack brings comprehensive alert and performance metrics from Azure resources into SCOM.
• Along with a modernized and extensible SCOM full HTML web console, subscriptions and notifications are now modernized with support for HTML based email.
• Maintenance schedules in SCOM with SQL server AlwaysOn are now supported.
• SCOM Update and Recommendations feature for Linux workloads enables discovery of up-to-date MPs for Linux environments.
• Linux monitoring is now resilient to SCOM management server failover.
• All Windows Server Management Packs now support Windows Server 2019.
• Dynamic Storage Optimization in VMM enables higher availability of workloads.
• VMM now provides health and operational status of storage disks in Hyper Converged as well as disaggregated deployment.
• New RBAC role in VMM ensures that IT admins can be provided access commensurate with their role and no more.
• Support for latest versions of VMware in VMM (to enable migration to Hyper-V).
• Faster backups with DPM with a 75% increase in speed and a monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Log Analytics.
• DPM further supports backup of VMWare VMs including to tape.
• Orchestrator supports PowerShellv4+.
• Service Manager has an enhanced Active Directory connector.
• Support for service logon across the System Center suite aligning with security best practice.

You can get your hands on this latest release from all of the normal download channels including Volume Licensing Center, my.visualstudio.com and also the Microsoft Evaluation Center.

Enjoy!

Quickly Check Build Numbers for Common Microsoft Applications

If you ever have a problem trying to identify which version of your application its build number relates to, then I've got something pretty useful to help you out.

For the past year I've been referencing a community-authored blog that posts current build number references for common Microsoft applications and provides a download link to each cumulative update or service pack.

The list of applications that are referenced include System Center and SQL (definitely one you'll use a lot here). It's regularly updated (the new 2016 Tech Preview releases are all there) and goes back quite a few versions - MOM 2000 is even listed!

There's a handy navigation ribbon to choose your application or if you like, just use the tags.

Here's the blog URL:

https://buildnumbers.wordpress.com/

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

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.

Come along to the Official Irish Launch of Microsoft System Center 2012!

The official Irish and Northern Irish launches for System Center 2012 have been confirmed by Microsoft Ireland for March 22nd in Dublin and March 27th in Belfast.

I've been asked to present a session as one of four speakers alongside the presenting talents of Aidan Finn (MVP Virtual Machine), Damian Flynn (MVP Cloud and Datacenter Management) and Paul Keely (MVP Cloud and Datacenter Management)!

Each event is a full day out and kicks off at 10:00 until 17:00. The Dublin event is being held in the Berkley Court Hotel and the Belfast event is being held at the Hilton Hotel.

Here's the agenda for the day:

Time	Session
10:00 – 10:30	Event Registration
10:30 – 11:30	Hear how Microsoft takes the experience of running the largest datacentres in the world and applies it to scalable management solutions for customers worldwide
11:30 – 12:00	Damian Flynn from Lionbridge Technologies shares the cost savings and efficiencies achieved from implementing System Center
12:00 – 13:00	Lunch
13:05 – 16:15	Real-world examples from Industry Experts
	Demonstration based sessions sharing scenarios that you can take and apply to your business. Examples include Deep Application Insights, Cloud and Data Centre – Automation and managing from the desktop to the datacentre

And here's the BIO's for each of the speakers:

Subject Matter Experts

Aidan Finn (MVP - Virtual Machine), works for MicroWarehouse Ltd as a technical sales lead, working with Microsoft partners on Hyper-V, System Center and Forefront opportunities. He has been working with systems management technologies since 1996, and is experienced with Windows Server, desktop deployment and management, System Center, virtualisation, and so on. He blogs on http://www.aidanfinn.com, tweets as @joe_elway, and has written or contributed to books such as Mastering Hyper-V Deployment and Mastering Windows 7 Deployment.

Damian Flynn (MVP – System Center Cloud & Data Centre), works for Lionbridge Technologies (a Localisation, Logo Certification, Search & Content Services Company) as a Technical Architect of Corporate IT Infrastructure, working with the Business Stakeholders, IT Team, and Partners. Damian is a member of the Microsoft Windows Sever Futures Council, actively participating in multiple Microsoft TAP programs, and has being working on infrastructure technologies since 1994, with a high level of experience in Networking, Storage, Linux and Windows Servers, Virtualisation, System Center, etc. He blogs on http://www.damianflynn.com, tweets from time to time on @damian_flynn, and is a contributing author on the forthcoming book “Microsoft Private Cloud Computing”.

Kevin Greene (Subject Matter Expert – Microsoft System Center Operations Manager), works for Ergo Group Ireland. Kevin has been responsible for the deployment of a large number of System Center projects to enterprise level clients across all sectors. He blogs at http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.com and you can also find him on Twitter as @kgreeneit

Paul Keely (MVP – System Center Cloud & Data Centre), Paul has been working with System Center in its original from form for nearly ten years. He works for Infront Consulting group, a specialist system center practice that deploys system center to some of the biggest companies in the world.


You can register for the event on the Irish IT Pro website by clicking on the link below:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ieitpro/archive/2012/02/21/system-centre-2012-launch-events-in-dublin-and-belfast.aspx

Registration places have already been filled so hurry up before it's booked out and I hope to see you there!!

Resolving DPM 2012 Untrusted Domain Server Communication Issues

I ran into this problem during the week with a multi-tenant DPM 2012 installation. This server was originally a DPM 2010 server of which we had configured untrusted domain server’s to communicate with. The solution that I have outlined in this post will work for both DPM 2010 and DPM 2012.

All was working fine on this server until I noticed an alert from SCOM detailing the following:

Alert: DPM2012: Recovery point creation failed (3114) Resolution state: New

When I analysed the alert I found the following text:

The protection agent operation failed because DPM could not communicate with the Protection Agent service on sql-srv.lab.local.

DPM failed to communicate with sql-srv.lab.local because of a communication error with the protection agent. (ID: 53)

I logged onto the DPM 2012 server - using my newly configured Central Console through SCOM!, checked the agents from within the ‘Management’ tab and found the screen below:

It was interesting that all of the servers in this particular untrusted domain had the same ‘Unavailable’ message and straight away got me thinking that it had to be a password or logon issue with the account that is created when the communication is originally setup between the untrusted domain server and the DPM server.

When I checked the ‘Local Users and Groups’ on the DPM 2012 server and looked at the accounts for the untrusted servers giving the error message, I saw that I had forgot to change the password policy on the local user account when I originally created them and they were set with the password policy in the screen below

Untick the ‘User must change password at next logon and change it to ‘Password Never Expires’ and then click ‘OK’ to continue

A new feature of DPM 2012 is to use Certificate authentication (PKI) between the untrusted domain and DPM servers and if this feature was in use here, then I wouldn’t have the problem I was now facing (as the original DPM 2010 server that this communication was setup from didn’t have PKI functionality).

To resolve the issue was fairly easy though and here’s what I did to get the agents back to a working state.

Firstly, logon to the server in the untrusted domain that is generating the error in DPM and open up an elevated command prompt.

Now browse to the following location on the C drive of your untrusted domain server:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin

Once here, type the following to reset the password:

SetDpmServer.exe -dpmservername dpmservername.domainname.local -isnondomainserver –updatepassword

It should now present you with an option to type in your new password for the local account that the DPM server is using for communication between the untrusted domains.

Once you’ve typed your new password in twice, you should then get a message back stating that the configuration has completed successfully!

Now all that’s left to do is to go back to your DPM 2012 console, go to the Management tab and then select the ‘Agents’ option from the left hand side. Right mouse click on the agent that you have just updated the password for and select the ‘Refresh’ option

Once you have refreshed the agent status, it should now change to ‘OK’

 
Repeat this process for any other agents that you have with an error status similar to this one.

DPM 2012 Role Based Access Management with SCOM

This is a quick post to describe a new feature of System Center DPM 2012  - centralised Role Based Access.

With DPM 2012, you can achieve a centralised management model by using the DPM 2012 Central Console. See my previous posts on 'Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM' for more information and on how to install to Central Console.

Logon to your SCOM server which should already have the DPM 2012 Central Console installed onto it. Open up an elevated command prompt and browse to the following location:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\bin\
Once here, kick off the ‘DefaultRoleConfigurator.exe’ installer

Once this finishes you should see the screen below to confirm that the DPM Centralised Role Based Access is configured.

Once that's complete, open up your SCOM Console, go to the 'Administration' tab and then select 'Security' and 'User Roles'.

The screenshot above shows the new DPM 2012roles available for configuration within your environment - all from the central SCOM Console window and no need to logon to a DPM 2012 server to configure!

Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM Part 3

This is the final part of my blog series about 'Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM' and if you haven't read my previous two posts on this topic, then you can get to Part 1 here and Part 2 here - both of which go through the steps required to install the DPM 2012 Management Pack into SCOM along with the DPM 2012 Central Console integration that links the two System Center products together.

In this post I will demonstrate the centralisation of DPM tasks using the SCOM console as the central point of administration.

Open the SCOM Console, click on the ‘Monitoring’ tab on the left and expand the ‘Data Protection Manager 2012’ Management Pack folder. You will notice that you now have separation of the alerts within the DPM Management Pack down to ‘Backup Alerts’ and ‘Infrastructure Alerts’.

The ‘Backup Alerts’ folder and its contents show all alerts pertaining to backup issues such as recovery point creation, replica synchronization, disk backup and tape backup alerts.

The ‘Infrastructure Alerts’ folder shows alerts relating to the Disk Infrastructure, the DPM Server itself, Protected computers and also the Tape infrastructure.

The power of the new DPM 2012 Management Pack along with the DPM 2012 Central Console installed into SCOM is evident when you click on an alert and then look at the actions available to you in the ‘Actions’ pane over on the right hand side of the screen.

You will see that you have your specific ‘Alert Tasks’ actions along with your ‘DPM Data Source Tasks’ pane which both allow you to have a much more granular level of control when troubleshooting and resolving your DPM alerts.

To troubleshoot an alert, highlight the alert in the central window and then click on an action from the ‘Actions’ pane on the right hand side.

For the error above, I’ve clicked on the ‘Run Consistency Check’ action and the DPM server has initiated the consistency check without any other input required from me and has come back with the following message to confirm the consistency check has begun.

Now, if I click on the radio box from the notification above to launch the Jobs View to monitor the progress of jobs on exit, I can see the progress of all current jobs on my DPM 2012 server as shown below

Back in the SCOM Console again, if you click on the ‘View Affected Items’ task from the ‘Alert Tasks’ action pane, it will open up the window below

When this window opens up, you now have access to the three options for this specific alert. These options are: Troubleshoot, Take Recommended Action and Resume Backups.

If you click on the ‘Troubleshoot’ button it will automatically open up the DPM 2012 console with a scoped view of the particular error message directly from the SCOM Console like below

If you click on the 'Take Recommended Action' button, DPM will try to automate the recommended action (if any) for the alert that is raised. In this example, there is no corrective action required.

If you click on the 'Resume Backup' button, DPM will try to resume the backup job that had stopped due to the error.

These are just some of the tasks and actions that you can take with your new DPM 2012 installation once you have it integrated into your SCOM environment. It is worth remembering too that I haven’t needed to log on to any other server than the SCOM server so it is already consolidating the management of two System Center products into one application. Also, with the new DPM 2012 Central Console being able to manage multiple DPM servers including DPM 2010 and DPM 2012 at the same time, you can really see the benefits in upgrading to this latest version sooner rather than later!!