Author: Rhian D. Block
rhian@vazoom.net
Special Thanks: Jeremy Gavin
jeremy@itwire.net
Yesterday I had to deal with a company whose server which was running Microsoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server displayed
Limited Virtual Memory
Your system is running without a properly sized paging file. Please use the virtual memory option of the System applet in the Control Panel to create a paging file, or to increase the initial size of your paging file.
KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;257758
after logging into the system. There was absolutely no pagefile.sys to be found anywhere. Because of this memory usage was very high and disk performance was so f----d that Backup Exec haulted with a semaphore timeout period error, memory usage was well over the 1GB mark, and NTFRS issues were developing. After exhausting all of the KB articles a ticket with Microsoft was opened up. And, all day was spent with them modifying the registry and checking drive root permissions. Thanks to John Fasilakis and Will at Microsoft also for dealing with the annoyances and working the whole day on trying to resolve the issue. Beforehand, the latest driver for the SCSI RAID 5 card had been applied. The Adaptec card was a 2120S. But, nothing seemed to fix the issue and after the 25+ reboots of their system the end of my day had been chosen by both my headache and frustrations. The conference call would extend into the morning of 7/14/2004. (Well I now get to give them the good news)
At this point I need to give mad props to Jeremy who with his massive brain power assisted me with what turned out to be an issue with the Adaptec SCSI RAID management utility. At 11:30PM we terminal serviced into the box and began looking over a few things on the box. Jeremy pointed out an issue I had seen earlier for only a short bit of time relating to a parity error showing up in the System Log of Event Viewer. This error appeared to be coming off of the SCSI RAID adapter. After noticing this Jeremy and I also discoverd that the Disk Management interface of the server which would typically show the system volumes available to Windows, read nothing but a lonely CD-rom. That was very odd and obvious to us that something definitely wasn't playing nice in the system. So, the Adaptec RAID utility was completely uninstalled from the system. Some Virtual Disk Service errors appeared in the logs right after this change but we rebooted after making sure that the Page File was set for the C partition. (Side Note: Initial Page File Size should be 150% that of the physically installed memory. Maximum can be any amount above that but under 4096MB) Upon logging in after the 10 minutes it took to come back up the ICM2k3SRV system worked perfectly. This is just another helpful hint and fix if you ever run into this issue and exhaust the KB articles relating to permissions. Thanks for your help Jeremy. You are the shiznat.