How to simplify SCDPM servers maintenance

Every DPM administrator, ever tried to perform a regular maintenance onto a set of SCDPM servers (monthly updates, for example), knows that the only one way to do it correctly, i.e. without interruption of backup jobs, is to gracefully shutdown the server. To achieve this, you need to disable active SCDPM agents, connected to this server, and wait till every running job will be completed.

The only problem is — there is no quick way to get a list of every computer with an active agent connected to a SCDPM server. One may say, I’m wrong here and there IS a quick way — just use Get-DPMProductionServer cmdlet with “ServerProtectionState -eq ‘HasDatasourcesProtected'” filter. But you forgot about cluster nodes: If we protect clustered resource, but not cluster nodes themselves, we will not see them in an output of Get-DPMProductionServer (with abovementioned filter applied, of course). In addition, the output will contain clustered resources, which are useless in our task to stop every active protection agent.

That’s why I want to present you with a solution to quickly get a list of only real computers with an active SCDPM-agent installed. Just pass names of your SCDPM-servers to it (or don’t pass anything for localhost) and you’ll receive a collection of ProtectedServers in response. You may then pass that collection directly to Enable/Disable-DPMProductionServer cmdlets.

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