Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:
[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server" Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27 [170:313] One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session. Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.
Today I saw an interesting behaviour of two Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitch 6450. Both switches has been configured as a stack, but one of the switches showed a flashing ID after the startup, and the stack was not formed. While I checked the logs and the status of the stack, I noticed that the slot number was incorrect. Furthermore the status showed “INC-LIC”.
-> show stack topology Link A Link A Link B Link B NI Role State Saved Link A Remote Remote Link B Remote Remote Slot State NI Port State NI Port ----+-----------+--------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- 1 PRIMARY RUNNING 1 UP 1001 StackB DOWN 0 0 1001 PASS-THRU INC-LIC 2 DOWN 0 0 UP 1 StackA -> show log swlog <snip> THU MAR 03 13:07:29 2016 STACK-MANAGER info == SM == Stack Port A Status Changed: DOWN THU MAR 03 13:07:29 2016 STACK-MANAGER info == SM == NI 0 down notification sent to LAG THU MAR 03 13:08:41 2016 STACK-MANAGER info == SM == Stack Port A Status Changed: UP THU MAR 03 13:08:41 2016 STACK-MANAGER info == SM == Stack Port A MAC Frames TX/RX Enabled THU MAR 03 13:08:42 2016 STACK-MANAGER info Retaining Module Id for slot 2 unit 0 as 1 THU MAR 03 13:08:46 2016 STACK-MANAGER info == SM == An element enters passthru mode (incompatible license) <snip> According to the stack status and the switch logs, there seems to be a problem with the licenses.
Important note: It seems that vCenter Server Appliance updates revert the changes. Please check the settings after each update!
The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) can act as a remote syslog destition for ESXi hosts. This is very handy for troubleshooting and I really recommend to use this feature. But VMware ESXi hosts can be really chatty and therefore it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the free disk space of the VCSA.
Since monday I’m helping a customer to put two HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c into operation. Both StoreServs came factory-installed with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU3, which is available since July 2015. Usually, the first thing you do is to deploy the 3PAR Service Processor (SP). These days this is (in most cases) a Virtual Service Processor (VSP). The SP is used to initialize the storage system. Later, the SP reports to HP and it’s used for maintenance tasks like shutdown the StoreServ, install updates and patches.
This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in CU6.
I ran a couple of times in this error. After applying changes to SSL certificates (add, replace or delete a SSL certificate) and rebooting the server, the event log is flooded with events from source “HttpEvent” and event id 15021. The message says:
An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.
Last sunday a customer suffered a power outage for a few hours. Unfortunately the DataCore Storage Server in the affected datacenter weren’t shutdown and therefore it crashed. After the power was back, the Storage Server was started and the recoveries for the mirrored virtual disks started. Hours later, three mirrored virtual disks were still running full recoveries and the recovery for each of them failed repeatedly.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Last week I got a call from a customer. The customer has tried to deploy new Citrix XenApp servers, and because the VMware template was a bit outdated, he tried to clone a provisioned and running Citrix XenApp VM. During this, the customer applied a guest customization specification to customize the guest OS (IP address, hostname etc). Until this point everything was fine. But after the clone process, the guest customization started, but never finished.
While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways:
using the GUI, or using the CLI So I created a new share:
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Nothing special, as you can see.
A customer of mine had within 6 months twice a full database partition on a VMware vCenter Server Appliance. After the first outage, the customer increased the size of the partition which is mounted to /storage/db. Some months later, some days ago, the vCSA became unresponsive again. Again because of a filled up database partition. The customer increased the size of the database partition again (~ 200 GB!!) and today I had time to take a look at this nasty vCSA.
The last two days I had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDP), or to use the older wording, terminal services. To be honest: Terminal servers are not really my specialty, and actually I was at the customer to help him with some vSphere related changes. But because I was there, I was asked to throw a closer look at some problems with their Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 based terminal server farm.
