24 September 2013

Resolve DPM Agents Time Zone problems quickly

I reside at UTC+2 time zone and it is exactly 10 hours different from Windows Server post installation default time zone (UTC-8). So when I schedule a backup in Data Protection Manager from the server with default time zone, it happens 10 hours later. So about half of my protected servers ran the backup at 12:00 (about lunchtime) instead of 02:00 in the night as it should be. If I change the time zone in the server, it won’t help.

This is because at the installation of the DPM Agent the time zone was not changed yet. Microsoft has the solution, which is very painful (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh757791.aspx). It consists of installation and uninstallation of the agent and recreating the protection group (some of the necessary steps isn’t even mentioned in that article).

After digging in DPM Servers SQL database, I found a quick and a little bit dangerous way of resolving the issue. You need to connect with SQL Management Studio to your DPM database and look at the table tbl_AM_ServerTimeZone:

SELECT * FROM tbl_AM_ServerTimeZone

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Copy one row with correct time zone to notepad and make a new command according the info you just pasted:

update tbl_AM_ServerTimeZone set
Bias = -120 ,
Description = '(UTC+02:00) Helsinki, Kyiv, Riga, Sofia, Tallinn, Vilnius' ,
DaylightName = 'FLE Daylight Time' ,
DaylightBias = -60 ,
DaylightYear = 0 ,
DaylightMonth = 3 ,
DaylightDayOfWeek = 0 ,
DaylightDay = 5 ,
DaylightHour = 3 ,
DaylightMinute = 0 ,
DaylightSecond = 0 ,
DaylightMillisecond = 0 ,
StandardName = 'FLE Standard Time' ,
StandardBias = 0 ,
StandardYear = 0 ,
StandardMonth = 10 ,
StandardDayOfWeek = 0 ,
StandardDay = 5 ,
StandardHour = 4 ,
StandardMinute = 0 ,
StandardSecond = 0 ,
StandardMillisecond = 0

This command updates time zone information on all agents! So please be careful.

After this single SQL command you must edit the badly behaving protection groups. You don’t need to change anything on those, but just click Next, Next, Finish.

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