Mirror, Mirror of the drive, oh please keep my data alive…

Today’s plan is to work from home because I need to record some demos for people that attended my events in Portland and Seattle in the past two weeks. In Portland I ran out of time (I didn’t manage Q&A Time well and it was first delivery). In Seattle, we had a projector issue that made demoing virtually impossible. Maybe those issues were the precursors to other problems yet to come.

I woke up this morning, made some breakfast, grabbed my first cup of coffee and then came down to the dungeon (basement office) to get settled in for the day. I decided to take a quick glance at the news and noticed that things were resolving very slowly. In my home network I usually find this to be an issue with my DNS server. A quick check and sure enough, there is a problem. Only the problem isn’t so much with the DNS service as much as it is with the network as a whole.

My DNS server is virtualized and managed within an isolated AD domain. My Exchange is virtualized as is my Web Server. All of these services are hosted on the same Hyper-V server and the VHD’s are stored on a mirrored drive for redundancy. Well, that mirror broke. It broke badly enough that Windows took both drives in the mirror offline. That meant DNS resolution was taking longer than normal as things failed over thus slowing down access to just about everything.

Long story long and……. now the mirror is re-synching which is causing a slow access issue of it’s own since it is re-synching close to 500gigs of data.

Once I have confirmed things are okay there I will settle into recording the demos and getting them posted online. In the meantime, look for posts shortly with links to the slides and a document that allows you to replicate the demo environment that I am using.

Tip – You can tell if I am working on my home network/web server when the banner on this blog loads slowly or not at all. That banner picture is actually own my home server.

Cheers!