Consider the following scenario, we have a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Front End (WFE) server called SPWFE01 and a SQL 2005 server called SQL01.  The MOSS databases are stored on SQL01, but SQL01 is a  shared SQL server, so also has other databases.  In System Center Data Protection Mangater 2010 (DPM) I create a protection group called SharePoint & SQL and from SPWFE01 select the SharePoint Farm, System State and a couple of folders from the C drive and from SQL01 I select all the databases, which enables the automatic protection of new databases on SQL01.  The synchronisation frequency is set to 15 minutes.

What I’ve found with this configuration is that the SharepointFarm\%SQLServer%\SharePoint_Config backup job can hang with a status of In progress.  When this job hangs all other backup jobs that are part of the protection group have a status of Pending.  The SharePoint_Config backup job continues to hang until you manually cancel the job.  Once you cancel the job, everything else that’s part of the protection group is backed-up.  You can then manually create a recovery point for SharepointFarm\%SQLServer%\SharePoint_Config and it runs successfully.  However, at the next automatic backup the job will hang and nothing will be backed up again.  Although this configuration is supported, the SPWFE01 and SQL01 jobs appear to be interfering with each other.

In order to resolve this issue, I split SPWFE01 and SQL01 into two separate protection groups.  I increased the synchronisation frequency to 30 minutes and offset the SPWFE01 jobs by 15 minutes, by right-clicking on the protection group and choosing Optimise performance.  This ensures the backups for SPWFE01 and SQL01 don’t overlap.  Since making that change the SPWFE01 jobs have never hung.  The downside to this configuration is that new databases on SQL01 aren’t automatically protected.