Recently I did an upgrade of FIM 2010 to MIM2016 for a customer of mine. I’ve described that process here. We’ve only upgraded our lab environment and are now testing whether everything works as expected. Today I was testing the flow that is triggered by adding a new user to the HR source. One of the things that MIM is supposed to do is create an AD account and an Exchange mailbox. However when the export run profile was executed on the AD MA we saw the following error:

Status: no-start-ma

In the Application event log:

In words: The management agent controller encountered an unexpected error.
 
"ERR_: MMS(8228): ..\libutils.cpp(10186): Failed to start run because of undiagnosed MA error
Forefront Identity Manager 4.3.1935.0"

When troubleshooting an issue like this it’s important to narrow down the possible causes. Is there a connectivity issue with AD? Is there an issue with a rules extension? Is there an issue with the Exchange Provisioning component? The latter is quite easy to check. On the configure extensions we can simply set the Provision for to No Provisioning.

After disabling Exchange provisioning the MA seemed to be able to export just fine. So something was up with the Exchange provisioning. To be sure nothing was wrong with the remote PowerShell I tested the URL by opening a remote PowerShell connection to Exchange [technet]. That seemed to go fine. After looking some more in the Application event log I also noticed several Application Crash (event 1000) events whenever I was trying to run an export profile. The application was mmsscrpt.exe. I’m guessing that’s the utility being used to setup the remote PowerShell session and call the Update-Recipient cmdlet.

I found an older article (link) stating errors like this might occur whenever .NET 4.0 is missing. But in my case I was running on a Server 2012 R2 with .NET 4.5.2 installed on it. Either way, that article pushed me into suspecting .NET. We had installed .NET 4.5.2 using the Add-WindowsFeature cmdlet. This is the exact .NET version we had:

As you can see we were running 4.5.51650 which matches .NET4.5.2 (May 2014 Update) If I may believe: http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_.NET_Framework_versions I binged a bit to find out whether there were any updates available for .NET 4.5.2 but I couldn’t find any. Then a colleague of mine (Thanks Kevin!) reminded me that very recently .NET 4.6 became RTM. So I went ahead and downloaded it from here:

• All links: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3045560
• Offline installer: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=48137

After installing the 4.6 package the .NET version showed us 4.6.00081 in the registry. After a reboot I performed the test again and now I could export to AD again while provisioning mailboxes on Exchange!

Conclusion:

Whenever you are preparing a Server 2012 R2 to host the FIM Synchronization Service, do not forget to download and install .NET 4.6 as the .NET 4.5.2 that comes out of the box is not sufficient.