[SP201x] Most common CA errors
A lot of customers often ask me about errors displayed in their Central Administration site. These errors are produced by the Health monitoring jobs in SharePoint, which make sure your servers are in good shape. Of course every administrator should have the goal of elimination these errors, but some of them are hard or even impossible to get rid off. Here’s a list of errors you might chose to ignore / switch off:
- The server farm account should not be used for other services
This is often an indicator someone did a “next-next-next” type of installation, not minding about service accounts too much. The farm account is then used to run several background services and perhaps it was used for application pools too. To resolve, you should create service accounts for these purposes and use those instead. - Built-in accounts are used as application pool or service identities
Another symptom of the “next-next-next” installation; account like BUILTIN\System or network service are being used to run background services or application pools. Remedy is the same: try to use service accounts instead. - The paging file size should exceed the amount of physical RAM in the system
This is a performance related rule, which is usally usefull to comply with. Basically, it is advised to have a paging file which is 1.5 times the size of your physical memory, or bigger. Either that, or you set the OS to automatically manage the size of the file. With the proper configuration of your servers, this error will disappear automagically. - Drives are at risk of running out of free space
SharePoint wants us to have a lot of diskspace ready for the case we need to perform a complete memory dump to disk. This requires five times the amount of physical memory present in your system, so SharePoint will check to see whether that’s available or not. To be honest, I never made a memory dump in my entire SharePoint carreer. For systems with 16GB, this rule implies you need 80GB of free space, which is quite a lot. In my humble opinion, this rule can be turned off, especially for non-production farms.
Disclaimer: Microsoft didn’t put in the health checks for fun, most of them serve a (good) purpose. So disabling the rules is something you will have to do whilst understanding the risks. But in most larger environments, disabling some of the rules is unavoidable.
When you have any rules you frequently encounter, feel free to add them in the comments below. Only the most common ones will be included, for a complete list check out the technet link below. I will update this post so it can be used as a reference.
Find a list of Health Analyzer rules here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686816(v=office.15).aspx
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