Several times over the past month, when our hosting server for SQL Server 2008 R2 has undergone a scheduled restart at 3:00AM, one of our 3 SQL Server instances fails to start. This behavior has also been observed in the SQL Server Agent service (same instance), as well as the SQL Server Integration Services service. All of these services have Start Mode set to Automatic. For the SQL Server service that fails to restart, I found the following error in the Windows NT System log (similar errors found for SQL Server Agent service and SQL Server Integration service):
Date 7/1/2013 3:16:56 AM
Log Windows NT (System)
Source Service Control Manager
Category (0)
Event 3221232481
Computer server.domain.com
Message
A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the SQL Server (SQL2008_APPS) service to connect.