In our production datacenter we have 2 CA servers that have about 10 customers each. There are 2 SQL 2012 servers that are used for EV, CA, and DA. The CA customer databases are spread evenly across the 2 database servers.
Neverfail makes a clone (essentially a snapshot) of the virtual machine and synchronizes the data from the primary to the clone. In the event of a failure you can switch over to the clone with little to no downtime. For the production CA servers we never got past installing Neverfail because it kept failing to create a quiesced snapshot. It was around that time we noticed this issue and decided to stop doing any more work with Neverfail until we got this sorted out. Neverfail is still installed on the server but its services are stopped and disabled. FWIW Neverfail is working on our test EV, CA, DA servers without any problems and dozens of other production application servers.
I guess I'm just trying to figure out what's happening in the background when the "Customer's Background tasks" option is selected in the evbaadmin webpage that would cause the status to show as "starting" and not change to started. I need some place to begin and none of the logs I've looked at really give much direction. It's also worth mentioning that aside from the status showing "Starting" in evbaadmin and the Service status showing Stopped in the CA client there doesn't seem to be any problem. Searches are running, random sampling is working, we can create new searches.. I figure those things wouldn't work if the background tasks weren't running....