BizTalk, MSDTC, SSO and Cluster

Last night (BTW it was a Sunday) around 8PM I received a call from my ex-boss and good friend Mike Prager who is working as a Senior architect in one of the major retail project in UK, saying “Hey! SK, we had a power failure this afternoon in our data center and after the servers came back all our receive locations are disabled and send ports are not started. When I try to access them via the admin console, I’m receiving the error “Cannot retrieve list of objects due to a WMI provider failure” have you experienced this before.” Well, I’ve seen this error in the past, but there are tons of things which can cause this error in BizTalk, we tried few things like checking whether all the SSO services are health on all the machines, MSDTC is running and configured correctly on each box, correct SSO master secret server is configured on the BizTalk group, etc, etc. At last, I left Mike with the option to try DtcPing, since I’m not physically there. I couldn’t assist much. This morning I received a call from enthusiastic Mike, saying “Hey! I solved the problem, the error is due to the race condition (dependency) between the DTC and SSO service in the SQL cluster. When the SSO service starts before the DTC, there is an issue. You get the WMI error. But if the DTC starts before SSO, everything is well and good.” The reason I’m blogging it is I never experienced this before and it’s one of those strange things which we’ll never think about. I hope this will solve someone hours of troubleshooting time. Thanks Mike, for sharing this information. Nandri! Saravana