Failover Cluster Manager Connection Error Fix

A few days ago I encountered a new error with Failover Cluster Manager. A couple of servers had been rebuilt to upgrade them from Windows Server 2008 to 2012. They were added back to the cluster successfully. However, one of the servers would not open Failover Cluster Manager properly, and tracking down the solution took a long time.

The problem server successfully joined the cluster, but now it would not connect to the cluster using Failover Cluster Manager. If you opened up the application, it didn’t try to automatically connect, and manually connecting with the fully qualified name failed too. Below is the generated error.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. failoverclustermanager_wmierror

I love how this error has absolutely no useful information to it. Luckily I was able to track Error 0x80010002 down online.

Research indicated that there was some sort of WMI error on the computer. Rebooting didn’t help anything, and after numerous attempts to correct/rebuild the WMI repository, not much was accomplished. Eventually, the server could connect to the cluster, but that only worked about 30% of the time, and it nearly timed out even when it did succeed! The cluster still never connected automatically.

After further poking around on the internet, I found a few suggested solutions, with my ultimate fix closely following this post. I still had to combine everything together and run scripts all over the cluster before things returned to normal.

First of all, this is a condensed version of the Cluster Query from the TechNet post linked above.

1) Cluster Query

$Nodes = Get-ClusterNode
ForEach ($Node in $Nodes)
{
 If($Node.State -eq "Down")
  { Write-Host "$Node : Node down skipping" }
 Else
 {
  Try
  {
   $Result = (Get-WmiObject -Class "MSCluster_CLUSTER" -NameSpace "root\MSCluster" -Authentication PacketPrivacy -ComputerName $Node -ErrorAction Stop).__SERVER
   Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "$Node : WMI query succeeded"
  }
  Catch
  {
   Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "$Node : WMI Query failed" -NoNewline
   Write-Host  " //"$_.Exception.Message
  }
 }
}

Any server that throws an error with the above query needs to have the following scripts ran on it:

2) MOF Parser
This will parse data for the cluster file.

cd c:\windows\system32\wbem
mofcomp.exe cluswmi.mof

FCM was still not working correctly, so I reset WMI with the following command.

3) Reset WMI Repository

Winmgmt /resetrepository

That will restart the WMI service, so you’ll probably have to try running it multiple times until all the dependent services are stopped. The command shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to process either way though.

After that, the server that failed the Cluster Query (1) was reporting good connections, but FCM still wouldn’t open properly!

I decided to try the two WMI commands (2 & 3) again on the original server that couldn’t connect to FCM. I had already ran those commands there during the initial troubleshooting, so I was starting to think this was a dead end. Still, it couldn’t hurt, so I gave it a shot.

I reopened FCM and voila! Now the cluster was automatically connecting and looking normal.

As a further note, after everything appeared to be working correctly, SQL was having trouble validating connections to each node in the cluster during install, and I had to run commands 2 & 3 on yet another node in the cluster before things worked 100%, even though that node never had a connection error using the Cluster Query (1).

Filed under: Clusters, PowerShell, SQL Server, Troubleshooting Tagged: Clusters, PowerShell, SQL Server, Troubleshooting, WMI Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.