SQL-Vault-FS Cascade Effect

[colmtourque]

I discovered something very fun yesterday. Running Vault 2007 in a pure windows shop where the file server is also a DC.  Overnight our SQL Services crashed on our SQL Server. This caused Vault to crash and in turn took down our File Server people were logging in (the server could only be reached via a direct console all server services were unavailable).  As a very odd note we noticed no services stopping during this (which caused a delay in discovering the cause of the issue).

I was curious to know if anyone could think of a reason that this would take down our the servers as opposed to simply having problems resolving Vaulted items.  We are going to test a couple theories for instance the affect of offline folders perhaps overwhelming the browser service.

[MichelZ · Accepted solution]

Alco

This should definitely not happen.
I'd suggest to open a case with Symantec to sort this out.

Cheers
Michel

[colmtourque]

I've opened a ticket with symantec.

But here is what we've learned on our own.  We were able to reproduce the events by taking the FSA Database offlline and then requesting numerous vaulted files from numerous systems (I want go into how we accomplished that for brevities sake if someone is curious I'll be glad to let you know).  This caused what I termed a cascade effect but in reality was not. Instead what happened is it simply filled up the browser queu on the file server (the Vault or SQL Server never experienced any other outage in fact). Which would make perfect sense if you think about it.  Stopping the vault services on the File Server stopped this from happening and allowed access to the file server again.

I'm curious to here what Symantec has to say and will see if SP1 fixes this issue, I'm curious if there is a counter I can watch on the file server to see if this is happening and cause it to stop the vault services.