Part 4 - Recovering a SharePoint Farm

To recover a Windows SharePoint Services farm you don’t need to use a Recovery Farm, the recovery destination must meet the following requirements:

· The front-end Web servers are configured the same as they were when the recovery point was created.

· The farm structure must be created on the front-end Web server; the farm data will be recovered to the existing structure.

· The instances of SQL Server are configured with the same names as when the recovery point was created.

· The instances of SQL Server are configured with the same drive configuration as when the recovery point was created.

You can encounter two situations when restoring a complete farm:

· A farm configuration exists as it did at the time of taking the backup. In this case, you will be restoring to a functioning farm.

· The Config database is corrupt and the servers in the farm are down.

To recover farm data to a functioning farm

1. In DPM Administrator Console, click Recovery on the navigation bar.

2. In the Protected data pane, expand the server that contains the farm you want to recover, and then click All Protected SharePoint Data.

The farm displays in the Recoverable item pane as server name\farm name. (Figure 16)

3. Use the calendar and Recovery time menu to select a recovery point.

4. In the Recoverable item pane, click the farm item.

5. Click Recover in the Actions pane.

Figure 16

6. We don’t need to use a Recovery Farm to recover a full far, so in this case you only need to complete the wizard clicking next.

7. The Summary window is displayed and it lists in the Recovery items, Details: window all of the SharePoint files you will be recovering.  The Total size of the restoration is provided as well. When you have made your selection, click the Recover button start the recovery. (Figure 17)
After the recovery is complete, the search indexes will have to be rebuilt. Based on the size of the farm and the search configuration, this may take 15-30 minutes or longer. Once the farm is restored, users will be able to navigate its content immediately with some minor delay caused by the search indexing update.

Figure 17

To recover farm data when the protected farm is unavailable

1. Create a new farm that uses the same instance of SQL Server and the same front-end Web server as the original protected farm.

2. On the front-end Web server that DPM used to protect the original farm, register the Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer service (WSS Writer service) by running the following command at a command prompt:

stsadm -o registerwsswriter

3. On the DPM server, in DPM Administrator Console, click Recovery on the navigation bar.

4. In the Protected data pane, expand the server that contains the farm you want to recover, and then click All Protected SharePoint Data.

The farm displays in the Recoverable item pane as server name\farm name.

5. Use the calendar and the Recovery time menu to select a recovery point.

6. In the Recoverable item pane, click the farm item.

7. In the Actions pane, click Recover.

8. Complete the wizard.

9. On the main front-end Web server for the server farm, run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard and disconnect the front-end Web server from the farm.

Note

If the main front-end Web server for the server farm is not the front-end Web server that DPM uses to protect the farm, you must also disconnect the front-end Web server that DPM uses to protect the farm.

10. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) and delete all Web site and application pool entries related to the farm.

11. Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, select to connect to an existing server farm, and specify the server name and database name for the farm you created in step 1.

Note

Perform step 11 for all front-end Web servers for the server farm.

12. On the Completing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard page, click Advanced Settings, and then click Next.

13. On the Advanced Settings page, select the option Use this machine to host the web site, and complete the wizard.

PART 3 - Recovering a SharePoint Item

If you want to recover a SharePoint item, for example, a document, the procedure is the same, except that:

· You don’t need to create an empty site collection like in the Step 1, because here you only want to recover an item.

· In the Step 2, you have to go to the place where the item is, selecting the site and drilling down to the item that you want to recover, and after that the procedure is the same. (Figure 15)

Figure 15 Recover an item

PART 2 - Recovering a SharePoint site

When you restore a site, DPM restores the database to the recovery farm, extracts the site from the recovery farm, and imports it into the target farm. During this process, DPM creates a temporary file on the recovery farm at a location specified in the Recovery Wizard. You should periodically delete the temporary files at that location.

· The target farm must contain a site collection with the same path as the original protected site. If the site collection does not exist, you can create an empty site collection with the correct path on the target farm before you perform the recovery.

In this How to, I started deleting a site Collection with the URL: http://moss2007/sites/Documentos that was already in a recovery point in DPM as you can see in figure 1.

1. Create an empty Site Collection in the Production Farm Server with the same URL of the one that was deleted. (Figure 2)

Figure 2 Creating a empty Site Collection

2. From within the DPM Administrator Console (Figure 3):

· click on the Recovery tab;

· in the Protected data: section, expand out the SharePoint server which contains the farm where the site is located;

· under the server name, click on the All Protected SharePoint Data entry. This will display the Farm name in the lower right-hand pane;

· Expand it, and find the site that you want to recover;

· In the calendar display, select the date and time the Recovery Point was taken which is to be restored;

· Select the site to be recovered under the Recoverable Item field by right-clicking on it. This displays the context sensitive menu with the options to Show all recovery points and Recover…

· Choose the Recover… option which brings up the Review Recovery Selection window. Chose Next to continue.

Figure 3

3. Select to Recover to Original Site (Figure 4), than in the Specify Recovery Farm Wizard (Figure 5) select the Recovery Farm Server (Figure 6) the SQL Instance of the Recovery Farm Server (Figure 7) and a temporary file location (Figure 8) and click next to continue.

Figure 4

Figure 5                                                    Figure 6

Figure 7                                                     Figure 8

4. In the Specify Staging Location give a file location of the production farm Server (Figure 9 and 10) and click next to continue.

Figure 9                                                    Figure 10

5. If you have SAN hardware that has the snapshot functionality enabled to clone and split a clone to make it writable and this SAN is connected to the DPM Server, then you can use this feature by selecting the Enable SAN based recovery using hardware snapshots checkbox in the Specify Recovery Options window. When you have made your selection, click Next to continue.(Figure 11)

Figure 11

6. The Summary window is displayed and it lists in the Recovery items, Details: window all of the SharePoint files you will be recovering. Click the Recover button to start the recovery. (Figure 12)

Figure 12

7. After this only need to wait for the successful of the Recovery (Figure 13)

Figure 13

8. Once the site is restored, you can see that he is again in the production Farm as the point that it was in the recovery point. (Figure 14)

Figure 14 The job is finished and with success

Part 1 - How to Create a Recovery Farm

DPM 2007 helps solve the problem of backup and restore granularity. The SharePoint backup APIs provide support for backing up content databases or the entire SharePoint farm. However, if you want to restore an individual site, list, or document, you had to use the SharePoint recovery farm architecture. With DPM 2007, you select an entire SharePoint farm to protect. During restore operations, you have the ability to select a single content database, site, list, or even document. In order to comply with SharePoint best practices, DPM does not directly modify the individual database contents. Instead, DPM restores the selected data to the appropriate location:

·         First, DPM restores the appropriate databases to the recovery farm.

·         Next, DPM uses the native SharePoint tools to inject the selected data back into the production SharePoint farm in a fully supported fashion.

So, first of all is important to understand the requirements of the Recovery Farm:

·         The Recovery Farm is a single machine SharePoint farm running both SharePoint front-end and SQL Server 2005 with SP2.

·         This machine must be separate from the DPM server, Active Directory and farm machines.

·         The version of SQL Server should be the same or higher than what was installed at the time of backup, and has to be in the Recovery Farm Server.

·         SQL VSS Writer should be running on the Recovery Farm.

·         The server has to be in the Domain and can be a Virtual Machine that is stopped and only starts when you want to make a recovery. It requires that you have enough space presented to the VM in order to restore any site ant its database. Consider the size of your largest Content database and its URL structure and add about 20%.

·         If you protect a MOSS farm, then the Recovery Farm must also be MOSS.

·         The features and templates installed on the Recovery Farm must match those of the target farm.

·         If a service pack or update is installed on the protected farm, the Recovery Farm must have the same service pack or update installed or item-level restore operations could fail.

·         Both the recovery and target farms must be in the same language and have the same language packs installed.

·         Install the DPM agent on this machine through the DPM server backing up the farm. The DPM Agent specially requires the VSS patch 940349 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=99034) Not required in Windows Server 2008.

After this you have more 2 steps to finish the configuration of the Recovery Farm:

·         Start and register the WSS Writer service.

·         Create the DPMRecoveryWebApplication in SharePoint.

Start and register the WSS Writer service

·         In the Recovery Farm Server, open a command prompt window using elevated privileges. From within the Command Windows, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin and launch 'ConfigureSharepoint.exe'

·         In the command window that appears, you will see the request "Enter the user name for “WSSCmdletsWrapper:" Enter the account name for the user account you granted Farm Administrator credentials  ( I used the account that Log on the service, in my case the Database Access account of the Sharepoint)

o    If you enter an invalid account, you will receive the following: Invalid user name.

o    Examples of valid user name are "username@domain" and "domain\username".

o    Once you add a Fully Qualified account name and hit enter, you are presented with the next line requesting a password.

·         Enter the password for 'WSSCmdletsWrapper'.

After a moment of configuring, the entry "The command completed successfully" will appear and the CMD window will close.

DPM only offers the option of protecting the entire SharePoint farm as seen in the screenshot below. This changes when the discussion revolves around recovery of data, as we will see after. DPM provide a great deal of granularity when it comes to recovery of SharePoint data.

      If the WSSCmdletsWrapper is not registered properly, then the SharePoint farm you see in the screen shot above will not appear. If it is missing, run the ConfigureSharePoint.exe utility on a SharePoint front-end web server to allow DPM to reconfigure the necessary options.

At this stage, you should be able to create a DPM Protection Group which contains the SharePoint servers take an initial replication of the content. Depending on the size of the sites, this can take a few minutes to hours to complete.

      Creating the DPMRecoveryWebApplication in SharePoint