Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016 Printer Redirection and Server Manager issues

Question

Hi All

We are encountering a rather strange issue on a few of our VMs. We are running a Hyper-V environment on 30 physical hosts. The hosts are made up of 4 different models, from 2 different manufacturers (Dell and Cisco). All our VMs are Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 or 2016. They are either Enterprise or Datacentre edition and full desktop installs, nothing running core edition. We run Symantec Endpoint Protection on all physical and virtual servers.

The issues we are having seem to manifest themselves in 2 main ways, although both seem to be connected. The first thing we notice is issues with resource redirection. We run an RDS environment for clients. With some of the VMs, the clients are unable to see their locally connected printers. On some of these machines, restarting the spooler seems to sort this. On the rest, a full server reboot is required. Following the reboot, it seems to work fine for that day, then it drops off again requiring another reboot. No errors or warnings in the event logs. It just doesn’t seem to work. We tested the drive redirection, and this also seems to drop off when the printers fail to connect. However, if the printers failing to work is fixed by the restarting of the spooler alone, the drive redirection is not affected and always stays working. This seems to happen on all 3 releases of Windows Server. It happens on different physical hosts from different manufacturers and ranging from 4-year-old hosts to 2-month-old hosts.

The other issues we have noticed is in the Server Manager. When you select the All Servers tab, you get a box in the middle showing the list of the servers that are online or offline, and deeper details if its online but cannot talk. Some servers seem to show up as “Online – Cannot get role and feature data”. These servers we cannot manage properly remotely or indeed locally for things such as RDS Broker that requires the Server Manager. We are unable to change any of the roles or features, to remove or add new ones. We are unable to install or uninstall any applications or Windows Updates. We are also unable to access Disk Management, the VDS being unavailable. We reboot the affected server and that will bring it back online, but the issue will come back, it may be an hour, or it may be a few days.

I have taken copies of VMs that are struggling and removed the AV, and removed all updates installed in the last month. The issue persisted. What is interesting, I took another copy of the same VM and popped it into an isolated network (Private Network) and it didn’t seem to be affected by the issue. I am running this test again and will update this with the results to confirm, but that does seem to be hugely out of the pattern, purely by isolating it. Now this may be due to another VM causing issues, or a lack of WAN access but I am pretty much out of ideas. I have tried as many iterations of this as I can think of, removed and tried various versions of it. I cannot see what is causing this. It seemed to start badly 3-4 weeks ago. It is not affecting all servers, and it is affecting different clients with their environments ranging from Workgroups to Domains, each client having their own space on the hosts. However, the network is one large subnet, so it is possible that something is passing across the LAN. As I say, I have tried everything that I normally would and done lots of digging online and found nothing.

Many Thanks

James

Answer 1

Windows Server products aren't supported here. You need the Microsoft Technet forums.

Answer 2

Hi James

Greetings! I am Vijay, an Independent Advisor. I am here to work with you on this problem.

This is consumer Windows forum. Windows server related question is best answered at Microsoft's Technet forum. I would suggest that you should post simultaneously (i.e. cross-post) to Technet forum also. So, your question will be on two forums - This and Technet.

Technet Windows Server forum - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/off...

Do let me know if you require any further help on this. Will be glad to help you.

Answer 3

Hi Vijay and Jim

Thank you both for your replies, I will post there instead.

Many Thanks

James