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I have an interesting problem - we are going to test our UPS backup system by pulling the plug in our server room for a short time.
Ideally the UPS will kick in and nothing interesting will happen, but there is of course a slight chance that the UPS will malfunction and our servers will drop dead from the power loss.
My question is - how can I minimize the effects of such a scenario? The machine is a Windows Server 2008R2 with some MS SQL instances - I figured I will put the databases offline and stop the SQL service, but there is still a chance that Windows will decide to mess with system files during the test and then it won't be able to boot properly again.
How can I make sure that Windows Server boots gracefully after a power loss? Thanks for all the ideas!
Rafał Saltarski
Posted 2015-06-16T11:28:43.283
Reputation: 123
2http://superuser.com/questions/833552/manually-flushing-write-cache-on-windows Flush the disk cache, probably easier than going through and making sure all disks and raid setups are in the safest cache setting. The disk will still be marked dirty, there will just be less cleanup. You could suspend about 16 processes too, and disable ~6 devices and all the disk, but that would seem inpractical and unreal. I wouldnt really worry about it for the most part the system can hard power off and live again, it happens to people :-). – Psycogeek – 2015-06-16T12:07:54.813
I suppose it's not the end of the world, but I would like to minimize the risk of wasting my Sunday on restoring Windows Server. :-P Thanks a lot for your advice, much appreciated! – Rafał Saltarski – 2015-06-16T12:17:35.657
I am thinking have it process something like Pi or prime, or be doing a memory test (got ecc?), or doing some other non writing process on purpose, so if a tiny glitch in the system happened during the switching, the calculation for prime would be wrong, or whatever. – Psycogeek – 2015-06-16T12:43:50.367