Upgrading Data Protection Manager from 2012 SP1 to 2012 R2

Our recent upgrade of Data Protection Manager (DPM) from 2012 SP1 to 2012 R2 generated one issue which wasn’t mentioned by the documentation on Technet.

The documentation on Technet is good and the procedure for upgrading DPM was very quick and easy. Pay attention to the Upgrade Sequencing documentation as not following this can result in component failure for which no rollback procedure exists.

Once the upgrade is complete, the agents on each protected client need to be upgraded and a consistency check run against all protected sources. Depending upon the volume of data protected, this may take an extended period of time. Following this procedure I saw two errors, one on each of our DPM servers.

In each case, the DPM database that was being protected on the other DPM server would not show as consistent. Running a consistency check would change the status icon to green for a few seconds before the consistency check would again fail.

The error was occurring because during the DPM upgrade procedure, the DPM database names had been changed. Originally the DPM database names were of the form

DPMDB_ServerName

Following the upgrade, the DPM database names were of the form

DPMDB_ServerNameGUID

In each case it was a simple task to modify the protection group to include the new database name and once a backup had been taken, remove the protection on the original database name.

Edit: I've come across another issue that occurs during the upgrade - the notification settings had been reset to remove the e-mail addresses that I had entered. This means that we were no longer receiving e-mail notifications for DPM issues. Again this was quick and easy to resolve, but it would have been useful for the upgrade documentation to flag it.