• Article

Manage protected SQL Server servers

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Data Protection Manager, System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

General SQL Server maintenance tasks might affect your DPM backups. Note the following best practices:

  • If you need to perform maintenance on a protected server and do not want protection jobs to continue for the duration of the maintenance, you can use disable the protection agent.

  • If you disable a protection agent for a server that is a cluster node, you should disable the protection agent for every node of the cluster.

  • We recommend you don’t change the domain or of a protected server. You can’t change the domain or name of a protected SQL Server and continue protection without disruption. You also can’t change the domain or name of a protected server and associate the existing replicas and recovery points with the new computer name. If you do need to change the domain or name remove members from the protection group, uninstall the protection agent, make the change, reinstall the protection agent, and then add the data sources to protection groups. Note that if you retain the replicas and recovery points, the data will remain accessible for administrative recovery until you delete the replicas. However, it will not be accessible for end-user recovery.

  • When a database is added to a protection group, DPM detects the recovery model that the database is configured to use. DPM does not allow log, or incremental, backups for databases configured in the simple recovery model. Log backups are only allowed for databases configured in the full and bulk-logged recovery models.When the recovery model of a protected database is changed from simple to full or bulk-logged, DPM protection continues as configured. When the recovery model of a protected database is changed from full or bulk-logged to simple, express full backups will continue to succeed, but incremental backups will fail.

  • If you replace a disk that contains SQL Server data protected by DPM you should assign the same drive letter to the new disk. You can then recover the protected data from the DPM server to the new disk.

  • DPM protects SQL Server databases through SQL Server instance auto-protection. This enables DPM to automatically identify and protect SQL Server databases that are added to instances of SQL Server to be automatically protected. You can use the cmdlet Start-AutoProtection to force DPM to immediately check for new databases and add them to protection if you cannot wait for the nightly job. Disable auto-protection by right-clicking the SQL Server instance in the protection wizard and select Turn off auto-protection.

  • When a path associated with a protected database changes, backup jobs will fail. To resolve this issue, remove the database from protection and then add the database back to the protection group. This change to the protection group will require a consistency check. After the consistency check completes successfully, normal protection jobs will resume.

  • If you rename a database that is protected by DPM you must add the database under its new name to an existing or new protection group and then remove the database under its old name from its protection group. The database will be protected as a new data source.

    You can run parallel backups if both databases are in different protection groups and both databases are on different versions of SQL Server.

  • When you make changes to a SQL Server cluster that is protected by DPM, DPM takes the following actions:

    • When a new server is added to a cluster, DPM issues an alert to install a protection agent on the new cluster node and protection fails.

    • When a server is removed from a cluster, DPM detects that a node has left the cluster and the server now appears separate from the cluster with no data protected on it.

  • A cluster node can have any number of resource groups. Moving a protected data source to a resource group, between resource groups, or out of a resource group can cause protection job failures. To successfully make any of those changes to resource group membership, stop existing protection of the data source and begin protection of the data source according to its new status, either as a single data source on a protected server or as a data source as a member of a resource group. This will allocate a new replica for the data source. If you change the name of a resource group stop protecting it, change the name, and then begin protecting under the new name.

  • To protect a mirrored SQL Server database, install the protection agent on both partners of the mirror and don’t mirror the database on the same computer.