HP Dl360 server with 18GB RAM and Intel Xeon E5504 2GHz quad processor
4 x 300GB SAS 10k disks set as RAID 5.
Disks are partitioned into 3 drives.
C: drive 128GB - Operating System
E: drive 400GB - Email (Exchange 2007) and SharePoint (2007) + WSUS data
F: drive 318GB - User shares and DATA storage.
The system is running SBS 2008 x64 with the latest MS patches installed and is updated on a regular basis every 4 to 6 weeks.
System in general is very reliable with very little downtime and this only for the regular patching.
It has been up and running since August 2010.
SBS2008 Best practices analyzer runs on a nightly schedule and reports no problems.
on an infrequent timescale with no regular sequence the system will become unresponsive to requests for about 10 - 15 minutes.
(within a 4 - 8 week window)
No new logins can be made on a client computer or at the server console.
Existing workstations Applications / data shares will stop responding.
The hard disk lights are active but no more than normal.
After this all returns to normal as if the issue had not occurred.
Checking the logs there are rarely any errors.
There are a few entries that have been noted overnight on the odd occasion.
every now and again We get messages about SharePoint databases missing / unavailable Event ids 5215, 27745, 6398 or Exchange
reporting that it is temporarily unable to contact Active directory event id 1003. (There is only the one server so this must be on
the local machine). When I check in the morning I cannot find any cause for these events. All SharePoint and exchange applications are working well with no issues.
We use Symantec End point protection for antivirus etc. checking the logs the scans do not coincide with any of these events or when the system is unresponsive.
Backup is via the Windows Server backup utility built into the system that runs at 08:00 and 16:00 daily. these are to USB disks swapped daily. There is also a backup taken at 19:30 to a Waterproof / fireproof device via scheduled command line using the windows
server backup command line utility. Most of the errors listed above in the event log occur in the early hours of the morning which are outside of the backup windows. The most recent lockup was 30 minutes prior to the backup starting so I would rule this out
as a cause.
I have very little to go on to determine the cause of the problem. Has anyone any ideas what the cause of the problem could be?
( I have tried searching on the subject on this forum and generally on Google search).
