System Center Data Protection Manager storage pool Dynamic Disk goes offline after rebooting

Microsoft

Feb 15, 2019

First published on TECHNET on Oct 12, 2011

Here’s another new KB article we published today. This one describes and issue where a dynamic disk goes offline after a reboot:

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Symptoms

Consider the following scenario:

You have a Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 computer running System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM).
The storage pool for DPM is presented through the iSCSI initiator.
You add the disk to the storage pool and disk is converted to a dynamic disk.
The dynamic disk is used for replica and recovery point backup.

After rebooting the DPM server, the dynamic disk shows to be offline.

Cause

The disk shows to be offline because the recovery point creation fails with the error "Replica is inconsistent".

Resolution

To resolve this issue complete the following steps:

1. Configure the DPM service startup type to Automatic.

2. Reboot the DPM server.

3. Check the Disk in the Disk Management console and verify that it remains online.

More Information

The iSCSI user guide says dynamic disks are not supported on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP or Windows 2000 servers.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/E/9/AE91DEA1-66D9-417C-ADE4-92D824B871AF/uGuide.doc

While the iSCSI User Guide indicates that this scenario is not supported, DPM has code to activate dynamic disks when DPM needs to read or write to a disk in the DPM storage pool. The timing issues mentioned in the Users Guide may result in the End User Recovery shares failing to come back on line until you stop and restart the server service.

Using an iSCSI disk for the DPM storage pool in DPM 2007 when running Windows Server 2003 is supported but may result in unexpected behavior from the DPM Server, especially during a restart of the DPM Server.

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For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2008480: System Center Data Protection Manager storage pool Dynamic Disk goes offline after rebooting

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer