A couple of weeks ago, I had a vm running Windows 2000 Server just up and decide to stop working as it should. I rebooted the server multiple times along with checking all I knew to check in terms of the OS running on the guest. This was a critical server in that it ran the software that handled production schedules for the factory. Having exhausted our resources locally, we engaged the vendor of the software to see what would be involved with building up a new server to run the software. It was during these conversations with the vendor that a colleague of mine in the department put forward the idea of cloning the server that was having the problem. I personally thought this would not have a positive outcome but we did this anyway. Amazingly enough...the clone of the problem server ended up working perfectly. I have no idea what the clone process could have changed but the clone is still now the production server and the server that was having problems has been deleted.
I came into work this morning and another server was having the same symptoms as the previous server from a few weeks earlier. The problem being the performance of the VM dropped tremendously. When this was happening, the server itself became very slow to respond to any input whatsoever. A colleague of mine in the department who admins the current problem server asked if we could clone the server to see if that would fix the problem. The server was cloned and sure enough, the clone came up and worked without a problem. It was after this that my colleague put forth the idea of powering down the clone and powering the original server back up. After doing a cold boot, the original server is working fine now.
The only thing these servers have in common is they were both P2V'd from physical servers back in 2006 or early 2007.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? It is just odd...no other way I can explain it. I feel like I should open a request with VMware support but I am sure how I would put into words the problems that were suffered with these two servers.
Any insight would be appreciated.
Grant
Message was edited by: tupelo.operations
