Monthly Archives: December 2012

Moving the Managed Metadata service to a new SharePoint (2010) Farm

We’re rebuilding an environment at work so I moved the managed metadata service over.

Doing so should be fairly easy:

  • Find the name of the database from your old MMS.
  • Copy / move that DB so it’s available on the new farm’s DB server
  • Set permissions on the server to the farm can get to the DB
  • Create a new Managed Metadata App on the new Farm, when you get to the point where you specify a database name, specify the name fo your newly restored/moved DB

That should be it – the system should use your existing metadata and you get to go to lunch on time.

Or do you?

I did this today after following some advice online only to be greeted with:

The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started. Please Contact your Administrator.
 
Hmm What’s going on here – I did a quick google and was told to look at the ULS logs, confirm permissions etc…
However, for me the answer was much simpler – it was actually in the error message!
Creating a new manged metadata service hadn’t actually started it on any node in my farm.  I went to CA->System Settings->Services on Server and my Managed Metadata Web Service was in the “stopped” state- I started it and went back for another look at the MMS console.
Still no luck:
The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started. Please Contact your Administrator.
 
Now what? I remembered reading in the logs earlier, a line that talked about the application load balancer not being able to find an endpoint for this app.
I know from experience that the internal load balancer in SharePoint updates via a timer job that only runs every so often (15 min is the default).
 
I went to CA->Monitoring->Timer Jobs->Job Definitions and manually kicked off the “Application Addresses Refresh Job”
 
Then went back to look at the Managed Metadata Service and BINGO – It worked.