Test Layout

High disk activity on SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 is an ongoing concern for our clients. Just yesterday, we had an SBS 2011 server with so much disk activity that it slowed down the Hyper-V host so that all VMs were not performing properly. To diagnose this issue, use Resource Monitor to view the Queue Length. When there is a problem the Queue length for a drive will be high and sustained. The % Active Time will also be high. These indicate that the disk is busy and has a backlog of work to perform. It's important to note that the actual disk I/O may not be that high. In our case, the Disk I/O was less than 10 MBps which is far less than the disk system is capable of. The Disk I/O can be low but the disks busy when many small operations are performed. The fix for this is almost always recreating the SBS Monitoring database. The SBS Monitoring database grows over time and eventually becomes a performance issue. We don't use any historical information in that database. So, removing it ...

We have done several migrations from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 without any significant incidents. This week we had a bit of hassle with Exchange 2010 not installing during the installation. No errors were reported by any of the premigration tools. In the Exchangesetup.log and SBSSetup.log we got the following error: [REQUIRED] A reboot from a previous installation is pending. Please restart the system and rerun setup. Based on some quick research, the general recommendation seems to be that you should reinstall SBS 2011 rather than trying to add Exchange 2010 after the fact. So, to recover, we restored the system state to the old SBS 2003 server (which we cleverly created just before starting the installation). At this point, we figured that maybe there was something weird because we had selected to download and install updates as part of the install. So, for attempt number two we did not install the updates and got a different error about being unable to find a domain controller. This one...

I've run into performance issues on SBS 2008 servers related to the monitoring database. I've noticed this issue as a disk access issue when a server is slow. From Resource Monitor, sorting processes under Disk by the Read Bytes has the SBSMonitoring.mdf file with far more activity that other sources. Typically processor and memory utilization are OK, but not necessarily. Two separate issues can be the source of the problem: SBS Monitoring database is too large and is using large amounts of disk space. If so, check this out: http://blog.korteksolutions.com/the-sbsmonitoring-database-is-nearing-maximum-size-on-sbs-2008/ . I used the downloadable new database from this location and it worked great. Missing indexes in SBS Monitoring database cause high disk and maybe processor activity. If so, check this out:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/smallbusinessserver/thread/d195baac-da8b-4387-9079-c55d5e1879b4