Data Protection Manager and Windows 2008

I’ve been playing with getting DPM running on Windows 2008 (SQL) for awhile now.  Mostly on and off, just when I have time to think about it.  Well, today I finally got around to getting it installed, successfully.

First of all my setup:

  • Frontend is on Windows 2003 x86 R2 with SP2
  • SQL is on a Windows 2008 x64 box
  • Reporting Services front-end is on a Windows 2008 x86 box

Things I found out while trying to install:

  • DPM will not install unless Reporting Services is installed on the same box as the SQL database.  You may be able to fix that afterwards, but this is a serious limitation.  In any sort of enterprise, reporting services is (or at least should be) segregated from the production database services box.  This was a large pain as I needed to move everything, ugh.
  • DPM’s installer doesn’t play nicely with UAC.  There’s a step that a registry item needs to be added to the remote SQL server.  However, if UAC is enabled on the SQL box, the installer fails saying that it can’t create that registry key eventhough I’m logged in as an administrator on both machines.  This is because on the SQL box, it’s probably getting the allow dialog box.  Simply turn off UAC on the remote machine, or run the installer as the local administrator account (password must be the same on both machines).

Now I just need to start backing up my Exchange 2007 server, since it has log files dating back to March the 3rd (ouch).

*Update*
Well, it looks like the DPM team has finally released the Rollup package to allow for Win2k8 system state backups (among other things).  Check out the news.