How do I manually remove a DPM agent from DPM after the protected server is gone? They de-commissioned a server and forgot to uninstall the DPM agent before taking the server down. Now the DPM console has a stale agent record in it. I have had a few people ask me how to remove these as it is not intuitive in the DPM administrative console. This is also something I ran into when I first started out with DPM. There are two methods to remove stale DPM agent records one is through the console and the second is through PowerShell.
Stop Protection
First thing you need to do is go and Stop Protection of any data from the computer that was de-commissioned. This needs to be done first regardless if you plan to remove the stale agent from the console or use PowerShell. Follow these steps to stop protection:
- Go into the DPM administrator console.
- Go to the Protection task area.
- Locate the Protection Group Members of the agent that needs to be removed then right click on the members and select Stop protection of member.
Console:
The first way to remove the stale agent is right from the DPM admin console. I have had people tell me they go to uninstall it and get an error but there is no way to remove it manually. There is but if you are not paying close attention it is easy to miss. Follow these steps to remove it:
- In the DPM Administrator console click on the Management task area.
- Click on the Agents tab.
- Find the stale DPM agent in the list that has red x and “Unavailable” in its Agent Status column.
- Right click on the stale agent and select uninstall.
- Go through the wizard Enter credentials that have access to the once protected computer, select manually restart the selected servers later and then click OK. This is going to just fail or give you this message:
The protection agent could not be removed from <COMPUTERNAME>. The computer may no longer have an agent installed or may no longer be in the domain. You may need to remove this record from the DPM database, and then uninstall the agent from the computer using Add/Remove Programs.
Remove the DPM record from the DPM database?
If you get that message click Yes to uninstall the agent manually. If you did not get that message just click OK on the error message window. Now look down in the Details section and you will see this link:
Remove the record of the server from this DPM computer.
Click that link to manually remove the agent. That link is easy to miss.
PowerShell:
The PowerShell method is straight forward. From the DPM management shell you will use remove-productionserver.ps1 to remove agent record manually.
NOTE: Don’t forget to stop protection of any data sources from the once protected computer in the DPM admin console before you run this command. If you do not remove protected data sources first this command will fail. Also note that running this command removes the protected computer from the DPM database (DPMDB) as well as the trusted groups DCOMTrustedMachines and DPMRADMTrustedMachines.
Here is the syntax for removing the stale DPM agent record:
Remove-ProductionServer.ps1 <DPM Server Name> <Protected Server Name>
