System Center

Install and Configure System Center Essentials 2010 Part 1

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~ How to Install System Center Essentials 2010 ~

I recently had the opportunity to setup Microsoft System Center Essentials (SCE 2010) in my network environment. Microsoft System Center Essentials is a management solution for small to mid sized business network environments. It is a combination of a few System Center products including Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager. It also includes windows update services. This solutions puts all of these solutions in one interface so an IT professional can efficiently manage their IT environment from physical and virtual servers to clients and other network devices. In this two part post I am going to walk through installing SCE 2010 and some basic configuration.

Software Used:

Below is the list of software you will need for your deployment.

  • OS is Windows Server 2008 R2
  • SQL Server 2008 R2
  • System Center Essentials 2010

Install of SQL:

First thing we need to do is install SQL server. SCE 2010 has a database on the backend and you need somewhere to store this.

You can use a local SQL instance or a remote SQL instance on an existing SQL server. I will walk you through installing this on the same server you will install SCE2010 on.

  • Launch your SQL install and click next on the “Setup Support Rules” and “Setup Role” screens accept the defaults.
  • You will then come to the “Feature Selection” screen select the same features as the image below.

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  • You can chose to use the default instance. SQL will give it a name for you. I like to use named instances. Chose one of the options and click next.

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Exchange 07 backup with DPM 07

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I recently had the task of backing up Exchange 2007 using DPM 2007. I added the DPM agent to the Exchange server just fine. When I modified the protection group to add my storage groups I got an error saying I needed the eseutil.exe and ese.dll on the DPM server. I got these off my Exchange … Read more

Restore Win 08 SystemState that was recovered by DPM 07

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So you have your 2008 servers systemstate backed up by DPM 2007. Your server crashes and you need to recover. DPM 2007 does not give an option to recover to the server only to tape or a network share.

 

What do you from here? The answer is you have to actually restore the system state using Microsoft’s built in windows backup utility. There is another catch it has to be done via command line using WBADMIN. Here are the steps to recover a server using Windows 2008 Backup from the command line:

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DPM “Replica is inconsistent” “Recovery point creation failed”

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In DPM 2007 I kept getting  “Replica is inconsistent” “Recovery point creation failed” errors on some of my protected members. You can see further details of the errors below and suggested solutions.

 

 

Here are some steps I tried to resolve the issue.

 

1 Right click on the protected member with the error and perform a consistency check. (Did not work)

2 Checked the storage pool on my DPM server under management>>disks

 

 

as you can see there is plenty of free space.

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Manually install a DPM 2007 agent

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I ran into problems installing DPM agent on a few of my servers over the network through the DPM admin console. In this case I had to manually install the DPM agent on the servers I wanted to protect. Here are the 4 steps:

1. Locate the 2.0.5820.0 folder on your DPM server here in:

%systemroot%\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Agents\RA\

The 2.0.5820.0 folder is here and will have folders i386 and amd64 in it. If you are installing on a 64bit server use the installer from the amd64 folder otherwise just use the i386 folder.

2. Copy to this folder to the local %systemroot% drive on the server you want to protect. I created a folder in on the server I wanted to protect to make things easy called DPMagentinstall
for example c:\DPMagentinstall

3. Open a command prompt. If this is Windows 2008 server be sure to open the command prompt with elevated privileges. Then type: CD c:\DPMagentinstall\DpmAgentInstaller.exe YOURDPMserverFQDN

EXAMPLE: DPMAgentInstaller.exe DPM01.mydomain.com

It will then let you know that your server requires a restart if it was successful.

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Backing Up to External Hard Drives from DPM

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Microsoft Data Protection Manger does not support external hard drives. You’re choices are to backup to disk and copy to external later, backup to SAN/DAS, or backup to tape drive. From a Technet DPM FAQ: Storage Pool Configuration What types of storage can I use with DPM 2007? DPM 2007 supports use of any of … Read more

Sample scripts for Data Protection Manager 07

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I ran across this very useful set of Powershell scripts for DPM 07 on Technet. These scripts can help you do things you can’t do via the GUI. Here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/dpm/default.mspx?mfr=true and more will be added later but here are the scripts they have currently up there: • Automatically Add New SQL Databases … Read more

DPM could not connect to SQL Reporting

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I needed to pull some reports on our backup in Data Protection Manager. So I clicked on Reporting in Data Protection manager and it threw an error like this:

“DPM could not connect to SQL Server Reporting Services server because of IIS

connectivity issues.

On the computer on which the DPM database was created, restart the World

Wide Web Publishing Service. On the Administrative Tools menu, select

Services. Right-click World Wide Web Publishing Service, and then click Start.”

Apparently there is a permission requirement in IIS 7 for ISAPI extensions that use a wildcard script. DPM uses this.

So you have to go into IIS 7 and set the permission for script to resolve this. Here are the steps:

Open up Server Manager expand Roles, expand Web Server (IIS).

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