(Reposted for reference)

One particularly hot topic at the Midwest Management Summit 2014 conference last month was a relatively recent but increasingly frequent issue that was called out by Kent Agerlund in his blog post “House of Cards – The ConfigMgr Software Update Point and WSUS” (referred to all week as “the house of cards post”). This issue seemed to be popping up more and more in the community, but I had yet to see it with any of my customers. Until this week.

My intent in this post is not to rehash the root cause or resolutions for this issue as detailed in Kent’s post, but rather to provide some specifics on failures and error messages that may be associated in the hopes of saving people some time in troubleshooting the issue. 

After successfully upgrading a primary site server from Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 R2, I was working through the last verification checks for functionality when I noticed the SUP was starting to show synchronization errors.  The SMS_WSUS_SYNC_MANAGER was reporting failure to sync with WSUS with the following error:

WSUS Synchronization failed.
The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.

       

So of course I checked the wsyncmgr.log file, and found the following:

Sync failed: WSUS server not configured

Not configured?  I’m pretty sure I configured that.  What does the WCM.log say?

The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable
Remove configuration failed on WSUS Server
Setting new configuration state to 3 (WSUS_CONFIG_FAILED)

I’m still not buying it…I swear it was configured. So let’s check the WSUS Admin Console:

Well, it’s definitely not just ConfigMgr having trouble connecting.  I verified that the service was running, but looking in the Event Viewer I was seeing numerous errors for WSUS…errors like:

Event ID: 12072
The WSUS content directory is not accessible.

Event ID: 12052
The DSS Authentication Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 12042
The SimpleAuth Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 12022
The Client Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 12032
The Server Synchronization Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 12012
The API Remoting Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 12002
The Reporting Web Service is not working.

Event ID: 13042
Self-update is not working.

It was the “Client Web Service is not working” error that made the connection. I checked in IIS and sure enough, the WsusPool application pool was stopped.  I restarted the app, kicked off a SUP sync…and sure enough after a couple minutes it stopped again. So, as recommended, I disabled Rapid-Fail Protection and bumped the memory limit up to a healthy 8GB.  After restarting the app pool and kicking off a fresh SUP synchronization, everything is now working perfectly fine.

I recommend very highly that you read through Kent Agerlund’s post and take proactive steps to ensure that the app pool does not hit the upper memory limit and that WSUS is kept tidy to avoid these sorts of performance issues.