What are the effects of background applications on Windows hosts?

Several IBM® Spectrum Symphony customers have used background applications such as Diskeeper, NetBackup, or AntiVirus in connection with their IBM Spectrum Symphony cluster. It has now been noted on several occasions that this can have a seriously negative effect on cluster performance. More importantly, it can affect cluster stability (even cause downed clusters) and can be the root cause of various other problems. It is suggested to run minimal applications on all hosts in the cluster; especially primary and management hosts.

In order to detect problems related to background applications, it is advised to look at Windows Application event logs and Windows System event logs. This will make identifying these problems easier.