The quest for the source of the foul stench, part 1

Late one cloudy evening, I was alerted by one of the helmet-clad application team minions, who claimed that one of their spirits were not responding. It was time for an adventure!

Venturing into the land of the hypervisors, I noticed a foul stench of failure radiating from one of the hosts. Something was definitely rotten in the kingdom of Hyper-V host 2. I tried communicating with the ghosts within, but my calls went unanswered. The connection to the spirit world of the virtual servers residing in host 2 was down. I worried that the servers had run off to greener pastures, but The Wizard of VMM insisted that they were still in place. The Wizard also adamantly claimed that there was no problem whatsoever, and snorted offended that the foul smell had to originate elsewhere.

The horror struck me: I may have to go down to The Wasteland of Nexus to investigate. Such an adventure would require a companion fluent in IOS, the almost incomprehensible gibberish spoken by the dark-greenish inhabitants. May it be that the host was working fine as The Wizard claimed, but that the data just disappeared into the vast nothingness of DEV/NULL? I teleported in to the host console to interrogate the servers locally. After waiting in front of the server for a long time, the doors suddenly sprung open, and I was let inside. The poor thing was clearly in turmoil. The event scroll was running red with error messages complaining about everything from time sync to database connections. Some meditation in front of the scroll revealed that most of the problems were caused by a poor connection to the physical realm. This had led to an identity crisis; the server was not even sure of who it was anymore.

Just to make sure, I beseeched The Wizard of VMM to recite the incantations required to move the server out of host 2 and into a temporary host. After some time, the ghosts were once again responding to calls. I commanded the application minions to perform some tests. They sprang into action, and was shortly rejoicing, happy that their application was once again fully redundant. However, the quest was not over yet. Why were the ghosts so unhappy at host 2 and what was the source of the foul stench?

To be continued…

Part 2: https://lokna.no/?p=1842

Author: DizzyBadger

SQL Server DBA, Cluster expert, Principal Analyst

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