Tag Archives: DPM

Using same remote SQL 2012 SP1 instance for DPM 2012 SP1 and DPM 2012 R2

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We recently began to deploy DPM 2012 R2 into our environment. For ease of management, we use a single remote SQL instance for all of our DPM installations. Naturally, we decided to use the same remote SQL 2012 SP1 instance for new DPM 2012 R2 installs.

One of the first steps requires that you run the DPM Remote SQL Prep on the SQL server. When we ran this from the DPM 2012 R2 installation media, it upgraded the existing DPM 2012 SP1 Remote SQL Prep files causing all of the existing jobs on the DPM 2012 SP1 servers to fail. The errors were not evident in the DPM console, rather they were logged to in the SQL Agent on the remote SQL instance:

Message
Executed as user: DOMAIN\sqlservice. The process could not be created for step 1 of job 0x8ADCFE6FE202F04F8C7A11C240E42059 (reason: The system cannot find the file specified). The step failed.

The resolution was to re-run the DPM Remote SQL Prep install from the DPM 2012 SP1 media AFTER the DPM Remote SQL Prep install was run from the DPM 2012 R2 media on the remote SQL server. This restored the necessary files on disk and jobs began running again immediately.

SQL Server Reporting Services error installing DPM 2012 SP1 with remote SQL 2012 database

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We use Microsoft Data Protection Manager in our environment to protect our Windows workloads. Recently, DPM 2012 SP1 was released and we have begun the process of upgrading each of our DPM servers to this version, but encountered a problem with the latest server to be upgraded. Though the prerequisite check was successful, DPM would fail to install citing an error with SQL Server Reporting Services on our remote SQL 2012 server:

DPM Setup cannot query the SQL Server Reporting Services configuration

DPM Setup cannot query the SQL Server Reporting Services configuration

Viewing the error log, we can see the following error attempting to query the SSRS configuration via WMI:

[3/4/2013 12:05:44 PM] Information : Getting the reporting secure connection level for DPMSQL01/MSSQLSERVER
[3/4/2013 12:05:44 PM] Information : Querying WMI Namespace: \\DPMSQL01\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ReportServer\RS_MSSQLSERVER\v10\admin for query: SELECT * FROM MSReportServer_ConfigurationSetting WHERE InstanceName=’MSSQLSERVER’
[3/4/2013 12:05:44 PM] * Exception : => System.Management.ManagementException: Provider load failure

DPM is using WMI to get information about the SSRS installation, and is getting a “Provider load failure” error message. The natural troubleshooting technique here is to attempt to run this query manually via wbemtest from the SQL server itself, and sure enough, we end up with a 0x80041013 “Provider Load Failure” error message:

0x80041013 Provider Load Failure

0x80041013 Provider Load Failure

The SQL Server was originally deployed as SQL 2008 R2 and then upgraded to SQL 2012 SP1. Though there is a KB article describing this issue, there is no update for SQL 2012 SP1. You’ll also notice that the path mentioned in the error code includes v10 – which refers to SQL 2008. So, it seems as though the underlying problem has to do with an issue with the upgrade from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2012 and the WMI namespace.

Rather than open a PSS case to find the root cause, we decided it was probably faster to uninstall SQL entirely, then install a fresh instance of SQL 2012 and restore the DPM databases. If you choose to go this route, be sure to take a backup of your SSRS encryption key, DPM databases, master db, msdb, and the SSRS databases. If you don’t, you’ll spend hours reconfiguring reports, setting up SQL security and you’ll have to run DPMSync to recreate the SQL jobs.