I’ve just completed the process of building a new AppFabric Cluster on version 1.1 with a SQL backend over an existing XML Based 1.0 cluster… The new version appeared to fix a lot of issues that existed in V1.0, plus by installing a Cumulative Update you are able to use Windows Server 2012 standard to host a Highly Available cache cluster (now that it includes cluster functionality that only previously existed in Server Enterprise in 2008/R2)
Fortunately my old automated deployment scripts did not need that much tweaking aside from the obvious changes required to use a SQL server to store the configuration + changing my secondary cache count for scaling.
After the script established the Cache Cluster and added the host I ran into an issue when attempting to start the cluster to add the individual caches and assign permissions, I got the following error: “Use-CacheCluster : ErrorCode<ERRCAdmin040>:SubStatus<ES0001>:Failed to connect to hosts in the cluster”
There appeared to be no real help on MSDN to help me solve my problem… A bit of research yielded the following fixes:
- Ensure that the AppFabric Cache Host can resolve itself (and other Cache Lead-Hosts) via DNS, Hosts Files etc.
- Ensure that the Remote Registry Service has been started and the rule “Remote Service Management (NP-In)” on the Windows Firewall rule is allowed.
- Ensure that Firewall rules exist to allow App-Fabric communication (e.g. Port 22233 for cache port, 22234 for Cluster port etc).
My script opened firewall ports but didn’t start the remote registry service… After starting this service and reconfiguring my cache once more everything came online – I was able to add all all of my cache nodes to my brand new cluster.