Hey Checkyourlogs Fans,

Today, we were working on a Storage Spaces Direct cluster that is managed by Windows Admin Center. We love using Windows Admin Center because it gives our administrators an HTML 5 interface with rich reporting and performance history. When we attempted to logon to the cluster this morning, we received the following error message: Connection to remote Server <Server> failed with the following error message: WinRM cannot complete the operation. Verify that the specified computer name is valid, that the computer is accessible over the network, and that the firewall exception for the WinRM service is enabled and allows access from this computer. By default, the WinRM firewall exception for public profiles limits access to remote computers within the same local subnet. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting help Topic.


To troubleshoot, our next step was to see if we could ping the Cluster Name Resource.


Next, we opened Failover Manager to troubleshoot the issue.

We could see that the IP Address resource was in a Failed state.

NOTE: This is commonly caused by a duplicate IP Address in the Server Range.


Next, we changed the IP Address to something that was now free in our IP Pool.


That didn’t fix the issue à It looks like we have run into another situation where an update pending reboot is sitting on our S2D Cluster. See our other post for more details. http://www.checkyourlogs.net/?p=62853


I noticed that our network was sitting in a partitioned state, and it appears that Windows Updates might be the issue once again.

Sure enough, we had Windows updates pending as mentioned in our blog post above.

NOTE: We recommend that you turn off Windows Update via Group Policy or Registry on the nodes. You can also, setup updating via SCVMM or Cluster Aware Updating to avoid this issue in the future.

I hope that this helps you out if you run into these WinRM and Partitioned Network errors that we saw with Windows Admin Center and Storage Spaces Direct.

John