I’m working with a client moving their on-premises data center to Azure. We’re getting the first Domino servers configured there to test performance. I’m not an Azure expert, so the client is also working with someone who is. And while configuring the new servers for transaction logging, we came across and issue that neither had seen before.
Azure uses 4k sector sizes on its drives by default and while that is working fine for the drives running the Domino progream and storing the Domino data, when we went to enable transaction logging, Domino crashed as the log files were being generated, just as the last file was being created. It was a nice PANIC message:
[20F8:0002-2A68] HCL Domino (r) Server (64 Bit), Release 11.0.1FP2, October 20, 2020
[20F8:0002-2A68] (C) Copyright HCL Technologies. 1987, 2020
[20F8:0002-2A68] Please wait, creating new transaction logs in directory: z:\txlogs\
[20F8:0002-2A68] PANIC_SQLO \_rc = 0x00000000
[20F8:0002-2A68] PANIC_SQLO \_hiCode = 0x00002157
[20F8:0002-2A68] PANIC_SQLO file = logger\amqhsofn.c
[20F8:0002-2A68] comp = 11, fnc = 81, probeid = 80, errcode = 5010, extsympt = 006F
4A200000
Unexpected internal error returned to logger: 0x204A2010
[20F8:0002-2A68] Thread=[20F8:0002-2A68]
[20F8:0002-2A68] Stack base=0x91AEDA00, Stack size = 13520 bytes
[20F8:0002-2A68] PANIC: Unexpected internal error returned to logger: 0x204A2010
We tried rolling back to just 11.0.1 in case there was some kind of bug, but that didn’t make a difference. We also added the CREATE_R85_LOG=1 setting based on the documentation, but that didn’t resolve the issue. We ended up opening a case with HCL Support and they were very helpful once I got the logs uploaded.
The issue is with the transaction logs and the 4k sector sizes. It’s a known issue for some applications, though Domino isn’t listed as one in the Microsoft docs. There is also an SPR opened at HCL for this.
The fix was, unsurprisingly, to use a disk configured for 512 byte sector sizes. Which in Azure is a CLI or Powershell command. Once we had that done, Domino came up, created the transaction log files and continued to run.
Reference: Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows