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Say you want to use the DPM “SAN recovery” option. This requires storage management steps for which it is useful to know which Windows disks (LUN’s) hold the associated DPM volumes for a given data source. First a generic recap of the potential ‘DPM SAN recovery’ advantages and steps; ‘SAN recovery’...

With special thanks to Fahd Kamal for the backgrounder content. Imagine that you are experimenting with DPM 2010. You protect some data, and then you remove that protection group. Then, showing DPM to one of your friends, you protect the data again, and later unprotect it. Later that same day, you...

Those with interest in modifying and creating DPM protection from CLI probably appreciate this otherwise there is little sense in reading further I guess. Those that seek to save and recreate protection configurations are up for a task that proved to be a daunting one, you may want to look into a twin...

You may have scripts running fine since early DPM2007 days but start to show unexpected results with DPM2010. This blog explains what is likely happening and how to resolve that. Typically information returned from cmdlets is assumed to be valid unless some error occurred, right? That is no longer a...

You may encounter tapes in DPM libraries that are written with an unsupported block size and first need to be erased because DPM cannot evaluate such tapes and therefore will not do anything to it. The ZIP file that can be downloaded here contains a script, script user guide and two utilities to accomplish...

This solution combines several existing tape related scripts with enriched functionality. The short list is shown in the DPMTapeUtil user guide illustration on the right. You can download the script and user guide from here , provided “as is” no rights or warranties implied. This script...

Imagine you got a replacement library for a broken one, or one with larger capacity to partition or share between DPM servers but anyway shows up as another tape drive. For discussion sake we say everything is fine with the new library but you now got all those protection groups on one or more DPM servers...

The MigrateDatasourceDataFromDPM script can have many formats one of which is to migrate a source disk to a target disk or array of disks. How much space do you need to migrate? You need at least as much as the source disk size of course but what if 1 or more volumes span to another disk? Take the sample...

Suppose you found or created one of those valuable scripts but want to run it on a schedule or even schedule itself. Whilst there is this wonderful Powershell Pack that includes a module to utilize the task scheduler from Powershell, this article uses the standard “Schtasks” utility. We assume some familiarity...

The script shown below finds out how much recovery points volumes could be shrunk on DPM2010. One word of caution though: use the shrink feature with common sense and not as a regular remedy! Repeated small shrinks cause free space fragmentation and increases the number of extents. The shrink option...

When should I be concerned with this? Usually not at all and the DPM2010 RTM release will check actual LDM consumption providing an early warning. Neither will DPM2010 consume all LDM space allowing space for re-consolidation purposes to reduce extents should that be needed.  However, … …on large...

Knowing how to manipulate DPM by way of PowerShell can come in handy in many situations. For example, I had a case to where I was troubleshooting the DPM console that was crashing and there was a concern as to whether or not recovery points where being made for specific protection groups. Using the PowerShell...

Its 6:00PM.   You were supposed to leave at 5:00PM.   Your boss catches you as you walk out the door and says he needs a file restored for a presentation first thing in the morning.   You say, “No problem, I will restore it real quick before I head home.”   You head to the DPM server...

We had a great question come into the DPM Newsgroup recently. How do I automatically protect new VMs added to a Hyper-V host using DPM? In any virtualized environment, adding new VMs is a frequent operation. While backup administrators can protect an entire Hyper-V host using the DPM Management Console...

The attached script generates a report of the mapping between each Exchange Server, the backup Protection Groups and its associated SGs. Krishna Mangipudi

The following script generates a comprehensive report of failures and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

The attached script generates a comprehensive report of the status of all backups and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

Tab Completion The most fascinating part of DPM Management Shell is Tab Completion of cmdlets. By learning the common verbs in Powershell (like Get, Set, Start etc.), a Windows or an Exchange admin can easily use that knowledge and learn the DPM cmdlets. This is because the same verbs are used in...

While using the DPM Management Shell, one would like to have a list of all cmdlets and its short help for quick reference. Also, we heard it would be useful to group the various cmdlets by the function they do – e.g. Library, Disk, Recovery or Protection related etc. Keeping this in mind, we have published...

Some customers had non-DPM issues, like network issues because of which consistency check (CC) jobs failed too often. For the benefit of them, we have added a script that would re-try CC until it succeeds. Note: In some cases, CC would impact the protected computer’s performance and hence use this script...

The scripts posted in this blog require knowledge of Powershell and DPM cmdlets. So we thought we would present some tips ‘n tricks to become power users! Introduction The first difference between any normal Command Line Interface (CLI) (typically, Windows cmd.exe based environment) & Powershell...

When a disaster occurs, and you lose your replica volume for any datasource, you could re-seed the replica from the backed-up data you have in tape. This little script initializes replica from a tape recovery point. The parameters have to be customized for your environment first as given below. Save...

The attached script removes all inactive datasources under a given DPM server. It provides options to remove inactive datasources on disk/tape/both. Save this as a .ps1 file and invoke it from inside the DPM Management Shell. Please contact us if you need any further assistance in running the script...

By design, DPM 2007 should be ‘ fire and forget ’ – meaning that after initial replication, data changes will automatically and routinely replicate.  However, due to a variety of external factors, the data set may become inconsistent.  Usually, DPM will correct itself within...

The following script creates a protection group with disk based protection, for a simple folder. It can be easily extended to add more data sources of different kinds – like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, System state or Virtual Servers. The Synchronization frequency and retention ranges etc. can...