Eric Jochens on SharePoint

Installing, configuring, and troubleshooting the finicky Distributed Cache Recently I worked on several farms where distributed cache encountered many errors and would not start in the system correctly.  I want to share what I did to fix and resolve this.

Issue 1: PortsRequirement: If you can, make sure the ports needed for the Distributed Cache Service (DCS) are open and working among the servers BEFORE you join a server to a farm or create the farm.

Why: Because if these ports are blocked, the DCS which provisions the App Fabric Caching Service on the server, will not provision correctly and only one thing will fix this afterwards.  The only thing you can do later is unjoin the failing server(s) from the farm and re-add them to the farm.

Scenario:  Farm has 4 servers, 1 database, 1 application, 2 web front ends with NLB.  The web front ends (WFEs) exist in a separate VLAN or protection domain with a firewall appliance separating the WFEs from the App tier and the database server.  Th…

The number one issue with installing on Server 2012 R2 is that the Prerequisite Installer fails no matter if the server has access to the Internet or not.  Even after you manually install these prerequisites and manually install the Roles and Features, it will report back that it fails to install the Roles and Features (which is true for the installer but does not necessarily mean your roles and features are incorrect).

​Note/Disclaimer:
This is not officially supported by Microsoft.  Microsoft states that SP13 Service Pack 1 may have support for R2, but this is not released yet nor do we have a release date.  While not supported, installing on Server 2012 R2 is still a requirement for some organizations and they weigh out the risks against the benefits. Step 1 Create a folder to store software.I prefer c:\software\prereq (Use whatever you feel is appropriate).These steps assume your server is online.  If your servers are offline you will need to gather the prerequisites on another …