ProLiant ML350 G4 - server freezes every few mins

[Abid Muhammad]

Dear All,

We have a SBS 2003 server that has some serious issues for few weeks now. The server freezes for about a minutes and then come back to life. During the freeze, users get the popup balloon telling them that Exchange is trying to retrieve data. Shared drives cannot be opened. Softwares retrieving data from the server hang. Remote Desktop connection to the server continues but can not perform any actions (mouse pointer can be moved). When the server is booted it take over 40 mins on 'Applying computer settings'.

A bit about the server:

OS: Windows SBS 2003 Premium Edition – SP2, with Exchange 2003 SP2, SQL 2000, SharePoint Services 2.0, SharePoint Services 3.0
Hardware: HP ProLiant ML350 G4
Smart Array 641 Controller
6 x 1462.8GB HDD (10K rpm) configured into 3 Logical drives -

Fault Tolerance: Mirroring - RAID 1+0 is used

x1 Intel Xeon 3.0GHz Processor
4GB of RAM installed (1Gb in all 4 slots)

Ultrium320 Tape drive with Yosemite backup software

Going through the logs Event ID: 7011 always seems to be recorded around the time the freeze happens.

It says, 'Timeout (60000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the NtFrs service'.

I've done some research into Event ID: 7011 and most suggest modifying the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters

[REG_DWORD] autodisconnect:
Original Value: 'f'
New Current Value: 'fffff' and this the maximum value for SBS.

Making this change initially appeared to have made things better. Before server was freezing many times a day and after the registry change it froze for a min, 3-4 times a day. I left server in a good state last night but today I found that the freeze is happening every 5-10 mins and server becomes unavailable for a min and then come back to life normally. And this is constantly happening.

Hardware diagnostics (using HP diag tools) show no issues. Green LEDs are shown on all 6 Hard Drives. I have already applied HP support pack 4. HP tech said booting CD from Firmware CD, it updated device dirmwares but problem persists.

This is becoming a nightmare for me now. I have been researching on this for weeks but can’t find what’s causing this. Please Help!

Many thanks in advance.
Abid

[Abid-sof]

Any solutions, suggestions or advice???

Thanks for your time.