Microsoft Service Fabric Host Service (FabricHostSvc) Hangs on Start

Question

I've been working with Microsoft Service Fabric since November 2015 and have encountered many issues but now Service Fabric has become completely non-functional on my development machine. Uninstall/reinstall doesn't help.

I was using 1.5-preview and have since tried 2.0 to no avail.

The problem started when I attempted to run a Service Fabric Application from Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 (as I have done hundreds of times over the past few months).

My machine blue-screened (first time I've seen a Windows 10 blue screen). After rebooting, I was unable to get my Service Fabric Application to deploy via Visual Studio. The PowerShell script failed with the following message:

Starting service FabricHostSvc. This may take a few minutes... Start-Service : Failed to start service 'Microsoft Service Fabric Host Service (FabricHostSvc)'.

I went into the SCM and found "Microsoft Service Fabric Host Service" was in a state of Starting. It stayed that way for an hour. I tried stopping and starting the service several times and each time it hangs.

I uninstalled Service Fabric (Service Fabric, SDK and Tools for VS) and re-installed with the latest version 2.0 and it exhibits the same problem.

Reboot, same problem.

Removed c:\SfDevCluster folder, same problem.

Based on some other articles, I looked for any stray performance counters after uninstalling but there weren't any.

I tried looking through the registry but there are other Azure components with "Fabric" in the name. If I delete them, I will probably hose the rest of my Azure dev setup.

Now... when I attempted to start the service again, it did re-create the SfDevCluster folder and give me some logs. It seems to create two trace log files per minute and they have the EXACT same contents.

Every time it fails, the final line of the trace is:

Info ,11176,General.FabricSetup.Main,Operation failed with error 0xffffffff

An earlier trace (SF 1.5) seemed to use a constant rather than the hex value for the error. Seemed to indicate an invalid argument.

Whatever this failure is, it seems to be the cause of my woes. Unfortunately, the error is completely unhelpful.

I'm trying to avoid reinstalling Windows because that will kill an entire day of productivity.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

From an elevated powershell session please run: Unregister-ScheduledTask FabricCounters.

This will fix the issue.