So I have been noticing ever since I started goofing around with adding and removing drives from the Windows Home Server box I have running, that it isn't the same happy boy I saw in the year book picture. More on the drive stuff later, when I am done goofing with it – but I added a USB drive, and had to physically unplug the drive to get the server to reboot.
I started noticing a couple of days ago that the server was sluggish, and took a long time to connect after one of the PCs was restarted. Hmmm… that's odd. I just started getting into this afternoon and noticed the CPU usage was pegged. Yup. PEGGED. Right at 100%. Then after a couple of minutes it loosened its strangle hold and dropped to 85%, and that is the lowest it went.
Looking at the 50 running services, the two that had the highest CPU usage were DEMigrator.exe, and qsm.exe. So I aced them. Naturally they restarted, but the machine has been far more responsive since. I can actually get a remote connection to it in under 1 minute, and open the WHS console remotely as well. The network traffic was nil, and I am the only user on board – so I'm not sure why this happened.
I am willing to bet that since the USB drive I added to the clustered jacked it up, and since it wasn't removed in the preferred fashion – something else got jacked too. It's only a beta, so I expect funky crap to pop up. I found another thread on this sort of thing, but it didn't give me much other than what the DEMigrator.exe was being run for.
It looks like it's running pretty strong again, but I'm not sure I trust it at this point. Not that I should really trust a beta, but I will not be putting any non-recoverable data on that machine. Only backups. Watch for more information on the drive installs coming in a couple days.