Sims Server crashed big time

[Jay_Jay]

Thought I would share my experience of a Sims Server crash

Well it has been one of those weeks and our Sims server crashed and we lost Sims, so have spent today re-installing the OS and then restoring Sims from backup, the problem was that it crashed yesterday late afternoon so the backup was from the night before.
We have Sims running on a HP G5 DL380, the hdd's are raided, I had replaced one drive a few weeks ago that had failed with no problems, the raid controller showed no problems the HP insight software said everything was fine.
From what I saw it looks like the raid controller failed which in turn totally screwed the raid array which in turn crashed the server and also crashed SQL.

I need to deal with all the lost registers and reports now which I'm sure will be great fun

I have never had a server go like that on me before, especially a HP server, in light of this I need to research how if it happens again (never say never and all that) do I reduce the lose of data.

My question: Is there a way you can run a schedule to export Sims registers in one go at the end of the day, and what format could you do it in, excel file for example ??
Im not sure I would be able to do anything with things like assessment manager as it depends on the database file.

[matt40k]

No, don't export it!!

Just do a SIMS backup. If you r-click on dbattach from the startmenu, note down the path, open up CMD, enter the path and stick on /?. It'll list all the options so you can do an automatic backup which you can put into a batch file and then schedule it. You don't need to take SIMS offline and it shouldn't take long if you've got a quick system.

[glennda]

I feel your pain - im sorting out exchange!!

[laserblazer]

As a matter of interest, what do you use to backup and how trouble free was it to restore?

[Jay_Jay]

For our Sims server I use the LEA remote backup solution called Attix5, it is very good, the restore did not take long.
For the rest of the servers we use backup exec 12.5 to disk storage then to tape.

[Snuffkins]

Thought I would share my experience of a Sims Server crash

Well it has been one of those weeks and our Sims server crashed and we lost Sims, so have spent today re-installing the OS and then restoring Sims from backup, the problem was that it crashed yesterday late afternoon so the backup was from the night before.
We have Sims running on a HP G5 DL380, the hdd's are raided, I had replaced one drive a few weeks ago that had failed with no problems, the raid controller showed no problems the HP insight software said everything was fine.
From what I saw it looks like the raid controller failed which in turn totally screwed the raid array which in turn crashed the server and also crashed SQL.

I need to deal with all the lost registers and reports now which I'm sure will be great fun

I have never had a server go like that on me before, especially a HP server, in light of this I need to research how if it happens again (never say never and all that) do I reduce the lose of data.

My question: Is there a way you can run a schedule to export Sims registers in one go at the end of the day, and what format could you do it in, excel file for example ??
Im not sure I would be able to do anything with things like assessment manager as it depends on the database file.

Well i'd have the transaction logs and databases on seperate drives. Obviously the whole system failing would mean that wouldn't make any difference, but it's useful for speed and if only the drives with the database fail you can restore back to point of failure. What I do is schedule a 15 minute transaction log backup.

That way the worst that can happen is a loss of 15 minutes data and it's very quick with the databases being so small.

If you need any help setting it up let me know. What version of SQL server are you running?

[zag]

RAID is sometimes more trouble than its worth. It causes just as many system failures as it solves in my experience.

I use an SSD drive on my Sims server and its been rock solid for a year now. wether that will last is anyone's guess

[danrhodes]

RAID is sometimes more trouble than its worth. It causes just as many system failures as it solves in my experience.

I use an SSD drive on my Sims server and its been rock solid for a year now.

So you don't use RAID at all??

[zag]

So you don't use RAID at all??

Nope, not done that since I had a similar "RAID failure" on a server a while back. I use single drives or SSD's on all my servers these days. I do use RAID 5 on my main file server though but only the data side. The OS is on a single drive.

What people don't realize is using 3 disks in a raid 5 means 3 times more likely to have a single failure. There was a very good white paper written by google on this somewhere about the probabilities of disks dying and a good backup strategy is far more important to me than raid solutions.

[danrhodes]

Yeah I can agree with you there, it does save on costs as well and as long as you have a solid backup policy there should be no issues.

But I still think RAID is the way to go as it provides redundancy even if only using RAID 1.

D

[matt40k]

RAID saved by bacon more times then it's burnt me. The few times it did it was because it was a cheap raid controller.

[danrhodes]

RAID saved by bacon more times then it's burnt me. The few times it did it was because it was a cheap raid controller.

YAY for Bacon, I knew it had more uses than just gracing a sandwitch with its amazing presence!

[FN-GM]

Well i'd have the transaction logs and databases on seperate drives. Obviously the whole system failing would mean that wouldn't make any difference, but it's useful for speed and if only the drives with the database fail you can restore back to point of failure. What I do is schedule a 15 minute transaction log backup.

That way the worst that can happen is a loss of 15 minutes data and it's very quick with the databases being so small.

Is it what we do. Will make life simple in the event of something going wrong

Regarding Raid - We use Dell servers. We had a card go once. We just changed in for a few one and no data loss.

[zag]

With SIMS, I have a server running in parallel all the time. I backup the database every week night and can restore the the main or backup server anytime.

Sims is very easy to setup now its fully SQL, assuming you have the install CD anyway!!

[glennda]

With SIMS, I have a server running in parallel all the time. I backup the database every week night and can restore the the main or backup server anytime.

Sims is very easy to setup now its fully SQL, assuming you have the install CD anyway!!

i take a full sql backup everyday along with sys state and the S: drive once a week