Thursday, November 13, 2008

[THIN] Re: Meta Xpe 1.0 servers showing as down in the CMC

Hi Alan,

 

You are more than welcome.

 

I’m glad you are upgrading…however, XA 4.5 is old news too…XA 5.0 for 2003 is essentially XA 4.5 feature pack 2, but would be a better starting point to allow the introduction of Windows 2008 servers into the farm, etc, as it’s not recommended to mix XA 4.5 and 5.0 servers.

 

Anyway, I know the history behind that farm, and the people that built it, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they had messed things about that stopped perfmon from running. But this shouldn’t be the case. Sometimes you just need to wait a while on the older servers. Although, depending on what you are doing, it’s never really recommended to run perfmon on the server itself. Connect via another server, or download PerfWiz from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads.

 

I’m only down the road if you ever want to catch up for a coffee and chat off the list.

 

Cheers,

Jeremy.

 

From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of alan tropper
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:21 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: Meta Xpe 1.0 servers showing as down in the CMC

 

Hi Jeremy,

 

Thanks for the quick reply, I will check these suggestions out.

 

I have also advised that we need to replace the current environment and we are already well under way with testing for the new XenApp 4.5 environment, however it is around a month away so I have to try to fix the current outages Im getting.

 

One last issue Im noticing on these old servers is that perfmon wont even let me add counters which is really weird????

 

Thanks for all your help with the details below, its nice that there are people like you out there to help us mortals J

 

Cheers

 

Al

 


From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Saunders
Sent: Thursday, 13 November 2008 2:51 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: Meta Xpe 1.0 servers showing as down in the CMC

 

Hi Alan,

 

It sounds suspiciously like one of two issues.

1)      Memory leak or exhaustion

2)      SMB 1.0 issues

 

Issue 1 can be addressed on both W2K and W2K3 by following Microsoft TechNet article KB312362. By default, the Memory Manager tries to trim allocated paged pool memory when the system reaches 80 percent of the total paged pool. Depending on the system configuration, a possible maximum paged pool memory on a computer can be 343MB (Windows 2003 Standard) and 80 percent of this number is 274MB. If the Memory Manager is unable to trim fast enough to keep up with the demand, then you may receive event ID 2020 (The server was unable to allocate from the system paged pool because the pool was empty). But that is just one symptom.

 

By tuning the Memory Manager to start the trimming process earlier (for example, when it reaches 60 percent), it would be possible to keep up with the paged pool demand during sudden peak usage, and avoid running out of paged pool memory.

 

Microsoft will tell you that setting these values should be considered as a best practice, especially for busy servers. The optimum percentage for trimming will vary, but the default recommended setting (60%) is a good place to start.

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]

"PagedPoolSize"=dword:ffffffff

"PoolUsageMaximum"=dword:0000003c

 

If the paged pool memory was running close to the edge, something like a new AV engine/pattern or MS Hotfix could have pushed it over. You can use Microsoft’s poolmon to monitor this further.

 

Issue 2 can be “managed” by monitoring some perfmon counters and then tuning out the SMB parameters as per the articles listed here:

http://www.jhouseconsulting.com/index.php/blog/2008/05/15/smb-tuning/

 

If either or both the paged pool trimming and/or SMB is really busy, it may eventually recover over time, which goes close to perhaps explaining why it sometimes fixes itself without a reboot.

 

Either way, MetaFrame XP is no longer a supported product and now 4 major product releases behind.

 

Cheers,

 

Kind regards,

Jeremy Saunders

 

Senior Solution Architect - Virtualisation Specialist |  Datacom Systems WA  |  29 Oxford Close, West Leederville, WA 6007 Australia

Email: jeremy.saunders@datacom.com.au  |  Ph: +61-8-9210-0806  | Mob: +61-413-441-846  |  Fax: +61-8-9380-4226

Personal Blog: http://www.jhouseconsulting.com/index.php

 

From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of alan tropper
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 1:43 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Meta Xpe 1.0 servers showing as down in the CMC

 

Hi,

 

I hope someone can help me, we have 20 citrix servers in our farm and they are mixed 2000 & 2003 with a couple on VM. All servers have Meta Xpe 1.0 with latest feature release and service pack.

 

However some of the servers drop off the farm during the day and also at night, once re-booted they come back into the farm and show as up and then it happens again.

 

I have tried to re-build the problem servers LHC file but the issue is still happening, the servers processor and page file don’t seem to be too busy at the point when the servers drop off resource manager. The servers themselves stop allowing new users to log on but still maintain current connections so this points to a timeout somewhere with maybe the metric or zone server not getting a response from one of our servers in time….although why do they not come back into the farm straight away, occasionally they will come back as up without a re-boot but we cant carry on working like this in the environment.

 

The CMC does throw up an error code: 527 when try to select server and in the event logs we do see a Perflib event ID 1015 timeout error on the servers and event ID 257 which refers to Resource Manager unable to retrieve metrics. All servers are on the same subnet and can be pinged from and to each other

 

I have seen an article on increasing a Terminal Server timeout session but not how to actually do it…any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks in advance

 

Al

 

Alan Tropper

Server Operations

Customer Service Centre

Information and Communication Technoligies

Department of Education and Training | 151 Royal Street, East Perth WA 6004

Tel: (08) 9264 8126 or 5555 | Fax: (08) 9264 4701 | alan.tropper@det.wa.edu.au

 

 


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