Thursday 7 May 2015

Bug in inplace upgrade to Skype for Business Server 2015: Replica Replicator Agent won't start

As many in the community, we (@torstenegebirk from egebirk-public.sharepoint.com/blog and me) was excited to see Skype for Business Server 2015 being released on May 1st, 2015.
First installation in lab went apparently fine, after going through the prerequisites we added an extra 35Gb harddisk to the VM, formatted and assigned drive letter E. Rest of the installation process is out of scope for this post.
After installation all services very running with their lovely new "short" service names. Databases were where we expected them to be. Lovely.
As the new E drive didn't contain any data, we removed the harddisk, and rebooted the server. Then problems started.
After the reboot the Skype For Business Server Replica Replicator Agent service would'nt start (thanks to the Redundant Department of Redundancy). In the logging we saw event ID 3007 on the LS Replica Replicator Agent Service, see screenshot:


The problem is obviously a missing share on the E drive.
During the inplace upgrade the xds-replica shared folder was without notification moved from the original place, could be C or D (C in our case), to the drive with most available space. This is a problem, if you, for some reason, have placed your xds-replica folder on a certain drive for data storage.


The quick fix is to do following:
  • Recreate an E drive
  • Create a folder structure E:\RtcReplicaRoot\xds-replica\
  • Restart the Server service (this will "reshare" the folder after detecting that the physical location now exists)
  • Make sure NETWORK SERVICE and RTC Local Config Replicator (local security group on the front end servers) has Full Control in the share permissions
  • Make sure RTC Local Config Replicator local security group has full control in NTFS permissions
  • Start the Skype for Business Server 2015 Local Replica Replicator Agent service again
  • When service is started run the Invoke-CsManagementStoreReplication cmdlet
  • Wait a minute or so (depending on size of deployment) and check the status with the Get-CsManagementStoreReplicationStatus cmdlet
  • All servers should have Up-To-Date set to True
Then the folder share is available again with the correct share permissions



You could also follow Ken Lasko's post here: http://ucken.blogspot.com/2012/04/resetting-lync-cms-replication.html
The problem is still not solved, the xds-replica fileshare is not in the same place as before the upgrade.

Imagine this scenario. When first deploying Lync 2013 there was only a C drive with let's say 100 GB of space. Then later for some reason you create another disk on the server let's say to have a seperate drive for CLS logging. If the new drive has more space free than the C drive you will probably run into this problem.

As we know, during installation of Skype For Business Server 2015 the xds-replica share is always created on drive with most available space. During an upgrade scenario this should not happen. 

Bug has been reported to the Skype For Business server 2015 product team.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Kenneth, good post! Can I follow the steps in Kens blog post to move the folder back from E drive to C drive?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Technically: No.

      You can, however, use Ken's excellent blog post to move the folder to the drive with the most available space. Just make sure your C drive has more available space than any other drives, then the folder will move back to your C drive.

      Delete
  2. There is a more secure and supported method for that:

    https://itbasedtelco.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/taking-control-of-the-rtcreplicaroot-folder/

    ReplyDelete