Proliant ML 330 G6 slow access to network shares from time to time

[esantos999]

Hi,

I have a customer running a small office with a HP ProLiant ML 330 G6 as server and 5 Dell desktop PC with a mix of Windows 8 and Windows 7. The server is running Windows Small Business Server 2011. It has 10Gb of RAM and 2X 250Gb SATA HDD's on a RAID 1 configuration. There are 2 logical drivers, drive C: (OS, system, and programs) and drive F: (LOB programs, users shared data).

Although there are 5 PC's in the office there are only 3 users that roam by the PC's as they need. A few months ago they phoned me because one of their LOB programs was reporting some errors, and several times a day when they try to save or open Word documents it took longer than expect since all the PC’s are weeks new.

I connect to the server via remote desktop and found out that when I open the My computer window sometimes the F: drive doesn’t show the bar with the space used, and in the address bar of the windows I saw a progress bar running from left to right. If I try to open the F: drive nothing happened until the bar showing the used space appeared.

Talking with the users the same time I was connected to the server I noticed that they can’t access the shared folders as long I can’t see on the server the little bar of the used space on the F: drive. This use to take about 5 to 10 seconds.(See the image attached below)

I opened the Task manager during the problem to see if there is something consuming a lot of CPU, but the CPU is about 10% at most.

I then went to the Event viewer to check for any problem and found nothing related to the problem. I reboot the server to see if the problem disappeared, but after a day or two the customer reported the same problem. I then created a scheduled task to reboot the server every day at 06:30Am with the hope it will solve the problem. I was wrong.

My next step was to run all diagnostic in the Insight Diagnostics Online Edition. Nothing wrong with the server was detected, it even reported that the server was OK and nothing should be done!

I call HP support for their help. They sent me the HPSreports to analyze the server. I sent back the reports generated and the answer was everything is OK, no problems with the hardware. What they suggested me to do was update the HP drivers and firmware to the latest version, and that I already did it. I have the Windows updated as well with the latest update from Microsoft.

Finally I run the anti-virus full scan (Trend Micro Worry Free) and Malwarebytes and nothing was detected.

Now my customer is telling me that the problem is getting worse every day, the whole thing is getting slower and it´s very hard to work like that.

I need some word of advice, some new ideas to find out what is the problem. My last resort is to copy everything to a new server, and reinstall this one, which I’d like to skip.

Thanks,

Edgar Santos

[TVVJ]

You may try by disabling TCP Offload engine for the NIC.

To understand if the hard drives installed in the server are working correctly, run the Array Diagnostics Utility.

If there are no hard drives issues, then the issue may be to do with how the server is configured for the applications installed rather than hardware defect.

Regards,

Vijayasarathy