ChrisC

Why do I seem to remember around 2 years ago (give or take) there was a hardware failure of [one of] the load balancer(s) that meant it had to be replaced? Again, this didn't affect everyone, but we were down for the X hours it took an engineer to get to the data centre and replace.

Search is back in the Android app! Thanks guys!

Is it that the photos app just doesn't load and sometimes flashes a little white bar under the start menu item and do these users use roaming profiles set to delete at logoff or similar? If that's anything like you're experiencing, check the following Group Policy setting: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > App Package Deployment > Allow deployment operations in special profiles Try enabling it if it's not.

Do you have print archiving enabled? I've seem similar issues where the jobs seemed to vanish once released. Disabling print archiving (and upgrading to Papercut MF 19.2.1) seemed to resolve it.

Are you able to run any tools like disk cleanup to see if you can free any space on c? I know 40gb is pretty lean, but have you used anything like treesize free to check if there's any clutter that can be archived off, moved to the larger volumes or deleted?

As mentioned with it being a kind of pressurised system, is there a water tank that feeds cold into the cylinder, if so is it particularly low, so a pump has been used to increase the head (or is it mains fed)? Just thinking if it's a tank, but the waters being pumped from it, that could raise the likelihood of historical debris/sludge being sucked into the tank? Grasping at straws now, but it sounds like the sort of symptoms of having too small a volume of hot water for your needs (but the actual tank size looks ok). Either that or you have ridiculously hot showers.

Actually just thinking, is it just the shower/bath affected, or is there a lack of hot water generally out of the sink taps in the bathroom and kitchen etc as well at the same time?

Ok, it should be ok to set your water to something like 65-70 degrees (safe temp to kill off nasties in the water as it's tank fed) otherwise it puts unnecessary demand on the boiler in terms of eco friendly-ness... But also, if it's getting to that temp it would be far too hot to use for bathing without skin grafts! Sounds like that's been done to compensate for an issue, and then if it's hotter, it can cause more scale to form more rapidly.

Pretty unlikely, but if it's going cold quickly there's a chance the tank is full of scale or sediment, meaning the volume of water available to heat is reduced, which means it runs out quicker....but I can't think the amount that can form would have such a dramatic affect.. Does it come out hot hot initially, or just "warm enough"?

They tend to have a dial to adjust.....unless the hot water temp is managed from a controller elsewhere!?

The box attached to the cylinder looks to be the thermostat. The dangerous looking one looks like the immersion heater. Which i'd guess was previously fed from the switch that's been "decomissioned" by terminating it in a junction box.

I wondered about a clogged valve, but (not following my own advice) discounted that with the fact they've had plumbers out and assumed competency in checking such things!

It doesn't *shouldn't* use the hot water in the tank to heat the radiators... The water heated in the boiler is pumped around the hot water loop and passes through a coil of pipe inside the tank and that heats the water in the tank that's then used for your hot water. If the heating is on, a valve will just open to the heating loop instead (or as well). As others have said, it sounds like a timing or thermostat issue. I could be wrong, but looking at the shape it looks like an off peak electric heated style tank, is there an immersion heater in it? Or are there 4 pipes in it (one cold in, one hot water out and then there should be a feed and return for the actual heating loop pipe). One thing to test is that one pair of the pipes should be hot to touch when the hot water is on, even if there is no demand.

on Android, if I hit OK to the invalid license dialogue box, it then redirects me to the tapatalk app on play store rather than letting me proceed.

This page gives a rough guide to specs and it also has a link to a handy storage capacity guide taking compression etc into account https://bp.veeam.expert/repository_server/repository_planning/repository_planning_sizing

What's the general age of the hosts? *making some assumptions* Are there any firmware updates available for the raid controller or hosts in general that could have some performance improvements possibly? Are all hops between hosts and backup infrastructure connected at 1000? I totally agree the specs allocated seem overkill and echo the suggestions that VMs generally need 4 cores max (especially as they're only running <10% utilisation, that also frees up additional resources should you need additional VMs in the future).

What does performance monitoring tell you in terms of load on the resources (for both VMs and physical)? It almost sounds like the performance bottleneck could be the storage or network, are there any clues in event viewer to performance issues? How beefy is the switching gear the host is connected to/the hops to backup?

I had something similar where a few could connect internally, but couldn't communicate with the gateway I fixed it initially by swapping the Wireless card on them with some spares(just make sure you have drivers handy if the lan port is dodgy. Then on some more investigation, found it was potentially a dodgy DHCP/DNS entry linked to the MAC of said card(s). Generally I got round it by deleting all related DNS/DHCP entries for the machine/MAC and renewing and hasn't happened since. If you hadn't reimaged already, I'd have suggested resetting winsock as it could be corruption.

Just to let you all know this has been extended until the 9th July. Feel free to contact me if you want a chat or any more information. Chris

So guessing to avoid the cost of VMware licensing (having no idea how much that is and also if the role/tools can be added retrospectively without affecting the current server) a physical box where your backup server is located would be your best bet? As Oaktech mentioned, DCs don't require mega specs.

That's obviously the ideal setup if budget allows! Chris

We have a DC hosted on our backup server on the other side of our site. This also means we have hyper-v manager on the backup server providing us a platform to restore critical VMs (using instant recovery) from VEEAM if our cluster falls over. *extra info* To get around backing that DC up in veeam because it's not in the cluster, we just do a WSB job for it onto a server that does get backed up. Chris

This is due to me leaving as network manager at Highcliffe (due to an opportunity elsewhere) and the team being reshuffled. It's a great school in a lovely part of the country! Feel free to reply here or PM me for a chat/if you'd like any more information. Chris

Their NOC team are investigating.

Seems more to do with core, as harry mentioned we're on a direct connection and are down at the moment