Troubleshooting Microsoft Reporting Services email subscriptions can be a pain. How many times have you created a new subscription a few minutes in advance and not received it, then you are unsure if you set the schedule time correctly, or if you pressed the save button, or if the fix you made to reporting services didn’t work? It’s a time consuming process, but thankfully, there is a better way. Bad Example - Setting the report to run in a few minutes is annoying and can go wrong Instead, you can run some SQL commands on your reporting services to trigger the running and resending of...

I was very excited with the announcement that Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 would bring memory over-commit (dynamic memory) to Hyper-V, something that has been available in VMWare for a while now. Although I wouldn’t use this feature in a production environment (read this blog post for an explanation why: Memory over commitment, not for production servers), this new technology is perfect for use in the development and testing Hyper-V environment at SSW. The explanation on how to setup Dynamic Memory In Windows 2008 R2 is below, but before you try it out – be aware that it is currently in Beta,...

What goes on in a System Administrators mind? When they are in the office our priorities are Servers, Virtual Machines, VLANs, iSCSI Targets and all sorts of business level IT. The question is, how much of this knowledge do us System Administrator’s take home with us? How much to we apply to our own personal setups? With my “SysAdmin’s Mind” posts you will get an insight into how I do things at home – and along the way you may learn a thing or two that you can apply to your own setup. I have just started setting up a new desktop computer for myself so in my first post will cover the hardware...

There are two reasons you may want to enable serialized (one at a time) backups of Hyper-V Virtual Machines on your DPM server: You have all your Hyper-V Virtual Machines stored on a Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and do not have a hardware VSS provider. You will notice that some of your VM’s often get a Recovery Point Creation Failed error. If you look at the DPM error log you will notice an error which says: Failed to prepare a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) for backup as another backup using the same CSV is in progress. (ID 32612 Details: Back up is in progress. Please wait for backup completion...

If you are running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and have a SAN available, Hyper-V Live migration is a great way to make your Virtual Machines highly available. There is nothing like being able to migrate your VM’s to another node in the cluster and shutdown a host to perform maintenance – I still get excited every time I live migrate a machine! In some cases though, your Live Migration attempt may fail. Unfortunately the Failover Cluster Manager nor the event viewer sheds much light on the reason in most cases. A failed Live Migration attempt Unfortunately the cluster event...

After upgrading from DPM 2010 Beta to DPM 2010 RC, you will notice that all your agents need updating in the DPM Administrator Console under Management > Agents After the DPM upgrade your management console will tell you that you need to update all the DPM agents To update your agents: Open the DPM Administrator Console and go to Management > Agents Click on Update Available and you will get a pop saying the backups jobs that are running on the protected computers will fail. Click Yes The warning message advising all your replicas will be come inconsistent when you upgrade...

To start the upgrade from Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Beta to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 RC, you need to need to download the RC (about 2GB) from http://connect.microsoft.com/site840/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=26452 Before you begin your DPM 2010 RC upgrade, I would recommend running a Windows Update, including the optional updates on the DPM server and then reboot. I say this as I ran through the entire setup process and got this error when DPM was a few minutes into installing: It’s a good idea to do a Windows and SQL update...

The release candidate (RC) for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager was released a few minutes ago. It can be downloaded from the Microsoft Website here: http://connect.microsoft.com/site840/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=26452 You can update from DPM 2010 Beta to DPM 2010 RC. Check my blog over the next few days on a step by step of this process. Some of the new features I am excited about with DPM 2010 include are Active Directory Protection SQL End-User Recovery Support for machines in a workgroup I also hope they have sorted out the permission issue when backing up Domain...

My workplace (SSW) is looking at standardizing our MSSQL backup procedures by having the same maintenance plan on each SQL server in the origination. I was asked to make this plan put backups to a local hard drive on each SQL server, which I disagreed with. My boss, Adam Cogan (Microsoft Regional Director) asked for Greg Low’s (Microsoft Regional Director, SQL Server MVP and owner of the SQL Down Under podcast) opinion on the matter. He advised that he also runs local backups on all of his MSSQL Servers, and then later copies them to a centralized network location. The main points I was arguing...

For some reason, Windows 7 (and Vista) does not allow setting the Critical Battery Action to “Do Nothing”. You may wish to use this if the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) in your laptop is reporting your battery charge level incorrectly. My poor old IBM ThinkPad T30 has this issue. Very annoying. The tool we will be using that comes with Windows 7 and Vista is powercfg.exe. Here are the steps: Activate the power scheme you want to modify. Open an elevated command console (Press The Windows Key, type ‘cmd’ in Start Menu, Press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter”...