The Network Manager at Westminster School presents solutions to sticky problems...

Thursday 13 December 2012

Exchange 2010 UM and WMF 3.0

Windows Management Framework 3.0 is about to be rolled out over Windows Update. Do you know what will break? I do! Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging. Specifically the part which uploads media files to the server for use in the Auto Attendants. When you try to do this you will get a WinRM error:

Starting a command on remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client sent a request to the remote WS-Management service and was notified that the request size exceeded the configured MaxEnvelopeSize quota. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
    + CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (um01.westminster.org.uk:String) [], PSRemotingTransportException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : JobFailure
    + PSComputerName        : um01.westminster.org.uk

This is the PowerShell version of the error. The EMC will weakly complain that it has been given the above message with roughly the same text. Can you live without the ability to upload message to Exchange? I thought not.

Trust me, the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic will not help you with this one. Changing the WinRM MaxEnvelopeSizekb value will not make a difference. The release notes point out that this has been change to 700. You can find out what WinRM config is set to by opening an elevated command prompt and typing 'winrm g winrm/config' to display the current config.

But WinRM/config is not the only place that MaxEnvelopeSize is specified! (See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee309364(v=vs.85).aspx) Hosted applications (such as Exchange PowerShell) also have their own configuration in IIS. This is typically in the system.management.wsmanagement.config xml portion of the web.config. Exchange PowerShell module has it's own virtual directory in IIS and it is here that you will need to make an amendment in order to restore functionality back to UM.

Find the web.config associated with the PowerShell IIS Virtual Directory. Found usually in the \Client Access\PowerShell directory. Make a backup. Amend the OperationsConfiguration node to add the MaxEnvelopeSizeKB="700" setting. Replace 700 with whatever MaxEnvelopeSizekb is in WinRM. (You've probably been trying to amend the value like I did and sinking into despair when it makes little difference. Go on. Admit it.) Mine now looks like this:

 
   
      ...
      <operationsconfiguration MaxEnvelopeSizeKB="700" ... >
</operationsconfiguration><
...
      ...


Reset IIS and the error should be gone. There are, of course, other issues with WMF that are detailed elsewhere. The most significant is the fact that WinRM IIS Extensions for me needed re-installing after WMF was installed, but that is well documented elsewhere.
As an additional warning, if you want to run update rollups, you will need to uninstall WMF 3.0 first before installing the rollup, and then reinstalling WMF.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for this! I had the exact same problem and the change to the web.config for the PowerShell virtual directory fixed my issue too. Good man!

    ReplyDelete
  2. StaceyIsLearning.

    Just what I needed.

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks a bunch for sharing saved me today!! 4yrs later!!

    ReplyDelete