"Failure [0xC3EC7814] Pool is not ready" while adding OCS Server to Pool
I was trying to get Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) to work on our environment for the past few days and ran into some challenging issues.
OCS 2007 is being installed on Windows Server 2003 x64 R2 with SP2, and the SQL 2005 back end is on a separate machine. Co-existing the two on the same box is not supported.
Our environment used to have an LCS 2005 Pool, which had been decommissioned while setting out on the OCS adventure. The schema preparation, creating an enterprise pool, and configuring the pool – all went through successfully. The show-stopper was the ‘adding server to pool’ part.
During the ‘Add Server to Pool‘ wizard operation, the installation of the program files and some additional configuration succeeded. However, when it was time to activate the server, all hell broke loose and the operation failed.
When I opened the logs, The ‘add server to pool’ log file showed:
Failure
[0xC3EC796C] One or more errors occurred during execution of the wizard; the wizard was unable to complete successfully. Please check the log file for more information.
Drilling further down into the log, I found that the problem was while activating the server. I clicked on the link to open the Activation logs, and found the following generic error:
Failure
[0xC3EC7814] Pool is not ready.
After ironing out every logical possibility, days of searching the net, and after asking in the MVP Private newsgroups with no luck, I decided to contact Product Support.
A few hours later, the problem turned out to be remnants of the past LCS pools that were still lurking in the Active Directory. We opened up ADSIEDIT, navigated to the Domain partition –> System container –> Policies container. Over here, we found the GUID of the LCS 2005 pools and deleted them manually. Since we didn’t have any more LCS 2005 servers, we didn’t need them anyway.
Due to this, OCS 2007 Pools were not actually being created in AD, even though the wizard ran successfully. After a successful pool creation, OCS 2007 Pools should be seen in Domain partition –> System container –> Microsoft –> Rtc Service –> Pools. However, the Pools container was apparently empty even after I created OCS 2007 pools.
Once we got rid of the LCS 2005 pool GUIDs mentioned earlier:
1. We removed the pool we created using the command lcscmd.exe /forest /action:RemovePool /poolname:<poolname> /force
2. Deleted the SQL 2005 database and log files for this pool
3. Re-created the pool from scratch starting with the ‘Create Enterprise Pool‘ wizard.
Server activation was successful and we are back in business!
Shijaz Abdulla is a Partner Technology Advisor at Microsoft, helping their top tier partners build on their Microsoft practice. He is also a trusted advisor to medium enterprise customers in Qatar. He is a blogger, tech enthusiast, and a Microsoft evangelist.
Shijaz,
Thanks so much for this post! It really helped me deploy LCS 2007 today!
Robbie
Dear Shijaz, I have a fresh installation of OCS 2007 Standard Edition. I did not created External URL during the Deploy Server Wizard during installation and now when try to do the same through lcscmd, it returns me this error that you have also encountered.
ERROR (0xC3EC7814): Pool is not ready.
Since, I have a fresh installation, your solution does not directly apply to my situation. I did went to the same location which you have pointed out, but when i tried to delete the containers, i was not able to do so, it returned some sort of error, like, could not deleted or something like that, also there were just containers and no objects in it.
I am really caught badly, needly help badly.
Hi there, we have LCS2005 SP1, and we are testing OCS 2007 R2, even we put the External Web Farm during the process of deploying Enterprise Edition, Address Book is no downloading externally, so we decided to run again the LCS command to add the Web Farm FQDN, but we get the same error, and obviously we can not delete LCS pool, what else can we do?, thanks a lot for your answer.