Ops Mgr agents not discovering Active Mailbox nodes

A while back, when I had first started rolling out Operations Manager 2007, I had a strange issue occur where the agents would not discover that the Active nodes in CCR mailbox clusters actually were actually holding the “mailbox” role. The agents made this discovery correctly on the Passive nodes of the CCR clusters, but not on the Active nodes. In fact, the agent wasn’t discovering any Exchange Server 2007 roles on the Active nodes of the CCR clusters.

The problem ended up being that something (although we never found out what) had a lock on the required portion of the Registry that the Ops Mgr agent was trying to scan. Working with PSS, Ops Mgr tracing per KB 942864 was dialed up and analyzed for the Active nodes of the CCR clusters. A snippet from one of the server’s “TracingGuidsNative.etl” log indicates that the Ops Mgr agent was failing to open the registry key below HKLM\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\.

[4]33AC.220C::04/11/2008-00:28:25.131 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\MailboxRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[4]33AC.220C::04/11/2008-00:28:25.131 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\HubTransportRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[5]33AC.1CD8::04/11/2008-00:28:25.131 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\MailboxRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[0]33AC.0870::04/11/2008-00:43:23.733 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key Software\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\HubTransportRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[3]33AC.220C::04/11/2008-00:43:23.733 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key Software\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\MailboxRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[5]33AC.3114::04/11/2008-00:43:23.733 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[7]33AC.2824::04/11/2008-00:43:23.733 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[7]33AC.2824::04/11/2008-00:43:23.733 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\HubTransportRole. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[0]33AC.0C18::04/11/2008-00:58:24.102 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[0]33AC.0D78::04/11/2008-00:58:24.102 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

[5]33AC.0D78::04/11/2008-00:58:24.102 [ModulesRegistry]Failed to open registry key SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server. Error 0×80070006(ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)

Unfortunately, no exact process was found that was locking the Registry. By chance, a reboot neccessitated by the installation of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Update Rollup 1 freed the lock. After that reboot, the discovery successfully completed.