System Center

Anonymous SMTP for DPM

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Setting up anonymous SMTP in DPM has been an issue for some time. Anonymous SMTP notifications don’t work even if you have your Exchange server setup correctly to receive anonymous email from DPM. Let’s step through configuring this. Here are the steps to setup SMTP in DPM that does not require authentication: 1. In DPM … Read more

Clarification of SIS-Limited on DPM

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I have seen some questions regarding SIS that is installed with DPM. After doing some investigating and talking with Microsoft and some of the DPM MVP’s I can offer some clarification. The SIS-Limited that is installed on a DPM server is actually a SIS Filter driver. The SIS Filter driver is what runs on DPM. … Read more

Backing up System State of Windows 7 with DPM

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Yes the title of this post is misleading. That was intentional. I have seen many fellow IT Pros in the community asking if backing up system state of Windows clients is possible with DPM 2010. Well it is not and it will not be possible with DPM 2012 either. DPM was designed to protect client data but not the machine entirely. DPM does a great job of protecting client data but there is a real need in some environments to protect client PC’s as a whole.

There is not an officially supported solution for this but there is a work around to protect the entire client.

For XP clients you could backup system state of your XP machines to a network share or folder and then have DPM pick it up from there.

Windows Vista/7 does not have a system state backup option. That was replaced with “Complete PC Back up”. Complete PC Back up in Windows Vista/7 is an image of the computer so it achieves a similar goal to system state. You can schedule to run the Complete PC Back up out to a folder or network share and then let DPM pick it up from there.

Again this is not ideal but it is a good alternative when you need complete protection of your client.

Here is the process to set this up on Windows 7.

  • Go to Start>>>Control Panel>>>Backup and Restore

Note that Windows backup has not been setup yet.

  • Click on Set up backup.

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The Windows Backup wizard will start. This can take a while to open so be patient here.

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Better Reporting in DPM through Prism

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Reporting for DPM has been a problem for many DPM administrators. You need better reporting on scheduled backup jobs, success/failures of backup jobs, details on tape jobs, SLA reports, and more. Your only other option was to create custom reports in DPM using the SQL views that come with DPM. I posted on how to do this a while back here:
https://www.buchatech.com/2011/01/building-custom-reports-in-dpm/.

Working with SQL views is not the easiest way to get custom reports if you are new to or not savvy with SQL Reporting services. Well the alternative to this is Prism.

A company named Bocada has developed a product called Prism that helps you get better reporting out of your backup solutions. They have a flavor for DPM. The nice folks at Bocada gave me a demo of this product live in action. Thanks Ralph!

I am going to give you some more details about Prism for DPM in this post.

There are many pros to Prism and only a couple of cons. One of the cons is that you still cannot bring the custom reports into the DPM console. They are however web based and easy enough to access. 
There still is a slight learning curve to learn how to customize reports.

Prism is a stand alone product that is deployed on a server and accessed via a web browser. It runs on top of IIS and accesses the DPM data directly through the DPM SQL database. Once Prism has collected information about DPM it is able to present the information as reports.

Prism can be setup to gather information from multiple DPM servers for reporting therefore it can be used in enterprises with many DPM servers.

Brocada  teamed up with Microsoft to create two default DPM specific reports in conjunction with reporting DPM related data in Prism. These reports are:

  • Recovery Point Summary
    Recovery Point Summary provides a summary of the number of Non-expired recovery points, Date of the last non-expired recovery point and the average recovery point in Range for all the clients being protected. 

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  • Recovery Point Status
    Recovery Point Status lets you see the various success or failures of your daily recovery points. 

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Export DPM Settings to .xml file

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Ruud Baars (Rest In Peace) of Microsoft hosted a DPM setting export/import tool on his skydrive called DPM-save-create-Config. This tool contains 2 PowerShell scripts called DPMsaveConfig and DPMcreateConfig that could be used to save your DPM settings to an .xml file and then import the settings in from that .xml file. The link is here: … Read more