Virtually no benefit

After applying some updates to a Windows 2003 server, this pilot fish comes in the next morning to find the server unresponsive.

"This is one of two virtual 2003 servers that we have," fish says. "The other was working perfectly.

"It happened again a couple days after that. Thinking the updates were the culprit, I uninstalled them and all was fine for about a week or so. Then it went unresponsive almost every morning."

After two weeks of logging into the virtual console to turn the virtual machine off and on again, fish is ready to scrap it and recreate the server.

Fish isn't all that familiar with the virtual console -- she keeps checking the event viewer, and that offers no clues as to why the server keeps going silent.

But fish finally spots a feature she never noticed before: an event log.

According to the log, each morning that the virtual machine has been unresponsive, there's an entry stating that the machine is entering a sleep state -- presumably to save power.

"We then checked the power settings for the virtual machine, and it was set to hibernate after a period of inactivity," sighs fish.

"We changed the setting back to 'never.' We're still not exactly sure how it switched to begin with."

Sharky virtually never sleeps. Help keep me awake by sending me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll score a sharp Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

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