Eye on Microsoft
About this Blog:
This is Shane O'Neill's blog about Microsoft's corporate strategy and its various software and services — the good, the bad and the ugly.
Microsoft Products: Tales of Disaster from IT Pros
From disappearing SharePoint Searches to Exchange outages, IT pros tell of Microsoft product mishaps and how they got fixed.
Did you know that today is National Systems Administrator Appreciation Day? If your answer is no, shame on you.
Hard-working IT soldiers deserve a day of recognition, so why not July 30? Given that life on the IT front has its share of bad days where servers blow up and CEO gets a computer viruses, Azaleos, a managed services provider for Microsoft, has launched a "Bad IT Days" story contest to honor Sys Admins everywhere. The IT pro with the worst, or should I say best, IT disaster story about problems with Microsoft products and how those problems were fixed wins an iPad!
Ok, so Azaleos isn't exactly being kind to partner Microsoft here (an iPad! Really?), but the contest is all in good fun despite the cringe-worthy tales on hand.
[ For complete coverage on Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system -- including hands-on reviews, video tutorials and advice on enterprise rollouts -- see CIO.com's Windows 7 Bible. ]
So without further ado, here are the contest's top five hard-luck stories from IT professionals involving Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and even BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Due to contest rules, only the entrants' first names and last initials were made available.
5. SharePoint Search Lost and Found — Paul B.
My company was working with a fairly large SharePoint 2007 environment — approximately 3,000 users across eight sites. I was the lead SharePoint administrator and in charge of all aspects of the farm. One day we began experiencing some serious problems with the SharePoint Search functionality. When the system would kick off a search, what normally would take an hour was taking five-plus hours and just hanging.
I spent a full day troubleshooting before turning to the Microsoft Support Service phone line for assistance. Working with Microsoft, we collectively accrued an additional 130 hours of phone support time and escalating the issue up to the most senior Microsoft support engineers. No matter what we tried, we could not get search to work.
Finally, I just happened to be talking with one of my IT colleagues about our virtualization technology on VMware. When I mentioned to him the problems I was having he said he didn't think that SharePoint should be having those sorts of problems, especially with it running virtualized on top of VMotion. That's when it hit me! First of all, I wasn't aware that my colleague had set up my farms on top of VMotion to begin with!
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When I learned this, I quickly confirmed what had been happening. When a new search would kick off, things would run as planned and the initial search results would start to pour back. However, because SharePoint Search creates such a heavy demand on the servers, VMotion would detect this load and move the SharePoint Servers to a new virtual guest instance. This move would break the connection between the search and the databases being searched and not allow the search to continue. Once we removed SharePoint from the VMotion platform we were all systems go."
4. CEO Calling: Where's My E-mail? — Martha K.
One morning my CEO called to say that he was not able to receive mail on his BlackBerry. I proceeded to look into this case and found that the Radius server was down in the subsidiary office where the CEO was located and VPN was not an option give current network troubles.
So I talked the very new and very green
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