Unity Fails to start when polling Exchange message store

[raortega]

Unity AvCsMgr would not start, with a fairly classic MalEx error indicating a failure to connect to the Private Exchange Store.

TAC worked with the customer for some time, and recommended a rebuild and reinstall.

The problem persisted after the reinstall.

After quite a bit of troubleshooting, the BU found the problem: Unity was unable to access the Service Control Manager on the Exchange cluster.

Since Unity pings the Service Control Manager on Exchange regularly, this prevented Unity from starting.

A quick workaround was to make the following registry change, to prevent Unity from pinging Exchange continuously:

Active Voice/AvWm/1.00/Disables Server Status Check = 1

Any ideas on what may have been causing the error? I am looking to try and change back to the standard registr settings to provide proper failover and queuing..

Regards,

-Ray Ortega

[oliviers]

If the following registry key is set, we'll get some return codes back from the Unity component that tries to open the SCM on the Exchange server...

HKLM\Software\Active Voice\AvWm\1.0\Diag Level = 1

The other registry key would have to be changed back to 0, to get the AvWM to try to check on a start up.

Services running as localsystem will have trouble authenticating with off-box E2K servers that are also DCs and with E2K clusters. LocalSystem cannot authenticate with NTLM. Using a Domain Account to run the services can solve that problem.

If the services are running as a Domain Account, and there are still problems, you can try to open the SCM on the Exchange server by running as that account. Can it be opened? If not, does it give an error message? To open the SCM on the Exchange server, try the following...

Start\Run\Administrative Tools\Computer Management

Right click at the top where it says "Computer Management" and choose to connect to the Exchange server. Then try to open the "Services and applications".

In the case where a Domain account cannot open the SCM, then I'd suspect that a Domain Security Policy is causing problems for that account on the Exchange server.