Cannot add physical server to Balance

[SIGEPSPAM]

Anyone know how to get around the error message "We could not find (an) Windows server located at the specified address. Have you entered the correct FQDN/IP address?"

We've successfully added many physical Windows hosts to Balance using the steps: "Discovery > Servers > Add Server".

I've tried via IP address/FQDN but it still fails. However -- we can ping it and use Remote Desktop to these Win2008R2 servers with no problems. Firewalls are disabled via Group Policy.

thanks...

[mkahlke]

Balance collects data from Windows servers using WMI from the proxy.  In this case, when adding a new Windows server, Balance will:

1. Validate the username and password credentials, making sure that no double-quote characters appear in the password.
2. Via the proxy, open a connection to the "root\cimv2" namespace and issue a WMI query for "select NumberOfLogicalProcessors from Win32_ComputerSystem"

In your case it would appear that Balance was not able to complete all of these steps, thereby resulting in the error.

You can try running "wbemtest" from the Proxy by clicking on the Windows menu at the lower left, then typing in "wbemtest" in the textbox where it says "Search programs and files".  Wbemtest is the Windows Management Instrumentation Tester and comes with Windows.  Click on the "Connect..." button at the upper right, then in the Namespace textbox prepend "\\w.x.y.z\" in front of "root\cimv2" where w.x.y.z is the IP address of the Windows server you want to collect from.  In the credentials section below, type in the User and Password then hit the Connect button.  (If you are trying to collect from the proxy itself then you can skip all these steps and just hit the Connect button.).  If the connection is successful, then your credentials are correct and you should be presented with 14 buttons all enabled within a section labeled "IWbemServices".  Hit the "Query..." button, then type in "select NumberOfLogicalProcessors from Win32_ComputerSystem" without the double quotes then hit Apply.  You should see a Query Result dialog with at least 1 result, double-click a result to see the response there should be a property called "NumberOfLogicalProcessors" with a corresponding CIM_UINT32 value.  If you are able to get this far then you have exactly duplicated what Balance is trying to do when you hit the Save button while adding a Windows server to Balance.  I suspect that you will fail somewhere above possibly with an 0x8000#### error which should help narrow in on what the problem is here.

[SIGEPSPAM]

Michael -- thanks for the tips about the WMI calls. You were correct -- "The RPC server is unavailable" "0x800706ba".

I did some internet searching and most of those similar issues talked about firewalls, etc. I re-tested that route (Group Policy forces the firewall off) and even restarted the WMI services. Then while testing it dawned on me -- we recently had some issues with another product IPSwitch What's Up Gold. I know WUG uses WMI calls too. The resolution for those WUG issues was reverse lookup zone (PTR) records being incorrect in DNS.

Sure enough...I found/fixed the PTR records for those servers I could not add to Balance and wala...

Balance can now properly add these various physical servers via IP and FQDN.

I'm assuming the Balance product uses some sort of reverse lookup or WMI call when attempting to add a new device to monitoring.

So for anyone out there with issues like this -- check your DNS infrastructure and then re-try adding servers to Balance.