Microsoft Technology Summit 2010!

 

MTS 2010 is one of the biggest and greatest Microsoft products related conference in Poland. I will be there as an DPM Expert and I hope that we will meet there!

One funny and one irritating thing

Funny one:

In DPM documentation you may notice something like that:

Important

DPM 2010 is not supported on the Turkish language version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

I didn’t find any information regarding the cause but still it’s quite interesting.

Irritating one:

Configuring tape backup for Protection Group may be really (and I mean REALLY) irritating when on “Specify long-term goals” window, you will set up first schedule and then customize backup. Reason is quite simple, after confirming things in ‘customize’ menu, schedule settings are erased and back to default Sunday 12:00 AM.

To put it simple… when you:

1. Set schedule for Monday 20:00
2. Go to customize options and i.e. configure retention range for 1 week and apply it.
3. You get: Tape backup with 1 week retention and scheduled for Sunday!

When you invert the order:

1. Go to customize options and i.e. configure retention range for 1 week and apply it.
2. Set schedule for Monday 20:00
3. You get: Tape backup with 1 week retention and scheduled for Monday.

It took me a while to find why my Monday’s backup is not really working J.

DPM 2010 didn’t notice the change of recovery mode.

As everybody knows, to have perfectly protected SQL database it has to be in Full recovery mode. This is the main requirement for x hour synchronization to addition to daily backup. But when we have configured Protection Group for SQL Instance and after we will change recovery mode for a single database .. what will happen? Nothing! DPM won’t notice anything. Solution is quite simple, we just have to exclude our database from Protection Group and then add it again. After this, DPM will also take care of this database during synchronization.

DPM 2010 and spaces in names of SQL mdf and ldf files.

For some reason, DPM cannot backup properly SQL Database when there is a space at the beginning or at the end of mdf/ldf file. For example database with mdf file “  BaseA.mdf” won’t be backed up and there won’t be any clear error message just something like “Replica creation failed”. So if you have any problem with SQL backup it’s good to start investigation with checking file names – in my case it was bull’s eye. I have found description of similar problem in DPM 2007, let’s hope that it will be fixed sooner or later.