Troubleshooting Blackberries after P2V
Earlier this week Anne Jan and I migrated a physical server with P2V with Blackberry Entetrprise Server. After the migration we of course asked the client to test all the services and application on that server.
At that time all seemed just fine, but today the client comes running in telling us that the Blackberry service isn’t mailing attachments anymore. Everything else just worked fine.
First thing we asked was when this problem started to occur. According to the client he got informed only this morning there where problems with it. When we took a look at the server we noticed a few services where not running and when we tried to start them we received errors and the services would not enter running state. Even the management console had trouble connecting to the database.
So what could have happened to it in that time? Could it be that the P2V messed something up which only came to light just now? Well, we doubted it so we started looking further into how the Blackberry service is operating. One of the things the service uses is a Microsft SQL server which was locally installed. After a lot of testing with connections to this database nothing appeared wrong. However we could not get the Blackberry management tool to open, we kept receiving login errors.
Suddenly we remembered that the physical server was also running Veritas backup software to backup his own data on tape. The client confirmed that he removed the Veritas backup software just last evening with a remote connection from his home. Although it sounded strange that this could be the root of all problems we investigated the uninstall of Veritas. We found out that Veritas uses MSXML 4.0 and with the uninstall of the software this was removed.
The Blackberry services uses the MSXML 4.0 also, so we reinstalled it onto the server. The installation was barely finished and the services and management console started to work again. We asked the client to run some tests and all was working well again.
This again gave us the confirmation that we rather should do a fresh install of machines when migrating than a ‘simple’ P2V ;-)
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’d like to say “that will teach them to use a blackberry” (I dislike RIM very much) but unfortunately for me and fortunately for the client it was only a missing softwaremodule.
Good job in finding it so quickly.
I’d like to say “that will teach them to use a blackberry” (I dislike RIM very much) but unfortunately for me and fortunately for the client it was only a missing softwaremodule.
Good job in finding it so quickly.