Network and Replication Troubleshooting Guide (Using WinMTR and Iometer) (4036082)

This article describes the network testing technique and the sequence of steps that need to be taken to perform network connection testing using the WinMTR and IOMETER free network diagnostic tools.

Description

In some cases, a replication or transfer failure might not be caused by defects in the Rapid Recovery software, but may occur due to some environmental or network connection problems. Such errors may include the following example:

ERROR 2013-02-26T21:31:26 [495] – Replay.Core.Implementation.Replication.Jobs.ReplicationJob ()
Failed to sync replication with remote slave core.
System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. —> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

Providing a complete network diagnostics can help detect the cause of the problem and provide an adequate solution. For a base network connection diagnostic, Quest\ Rapid Recovery recommends using WinMTR and Iometer, free software that you can download –at http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/ and http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html, respectively.

Complete the steps in the following procedures to perform a diagnostic check of the network connection.

To use WinMTR to check the network capacity:

1. Go to http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/ to download and run WinMTR tool on the target core machine.
2. On the WinMTR home screen, in the Host text box, enter IPv4 of Source Core.
3. Click Options.
4. In the Option dialog box, do the following:
   • In the Interval (sec): text box, enter 2.0
   • In the Ping size (bytes): text box, enter 500
   • Click OK.
5. Click Start.
   The quantity of Sent and Recv packages will be approximately 200.
6. Save the results to send to your Support engineer by doing one of the following:
   • Take a screen shot of the results.
   • Click Export TEXT to export the results to text.
7. Perform the test from the target cores to the source core and from the source core to the target cores.

To use Iometer to check the read/write speed of files to a disk where the repository is located on the source cores and target core: 

1. Go to http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html to download the Iometer application, and then install and run it on the machine on which you want to perform a test.
   Application should find the machine and create a Worker.
2. On the Disk targets tab, select the disk on which you want to perform the test, and then set the maximum disk size to 4194304 (equal to 2 Gb).
3. Click on the Access Specifications tab, and then click New.
4. On the Edit Access Specification dialog box, under Transfer Request Size, change the Kilobytes field to 8, and then click OK.
   NOTE: All other settings should remain at the default values.
5. On the Access Specifications tab, select the created object from the Global Access Specifications column, and then click Add to add it to the Assigned Access Specifications column.
6. Click the Test Setup tab, and then set the Run Time of the test to 5 or 10 minutes.
7. Click the Results Display tab, select Last Update, and then set the Update Frequency (seconds) to 1.
8. To begin the test, click the green flag.
9. Close the application, and then run it again to prevent it from freezing during the first test (this may happen because the application turns on the drivers to create a test file).
   NOTE: You will need to reset the settings, as not all settings will be saved.
10. Perform the following command in cmd on the source and target cores:
    wmic product get /format:csv > Software_%Computername%.csv
    The Csv file should be created automatically in the directory from which the cmd was started.