Option to launch MSMQ 4.0 management console not available for MSMQ 4.0 Cluster Resource

I had an very interesting case last week. Customer has a Win2k8 Cluster. He has Clustered MSMQ and the MSMQ resource is online and fully functional. The Problem he was facing is how to manage MSMQ? On Win2000 and Win2003 Clusters we have the MMCV tool that can be used to manage the cluster resource. On Win2008 when you create a MSMQ resource you have the capability to manage by lauching the MSMQ Management Console from the Cluster Failover Admin. All you need to do is select the MSMQ resource and then select Computer Management.  In this particular case, the management functionality was not visible.

During the course of troubleshooting, we recreated the MSMQ resource a couple of times. But that did not help. After a lot of research, I found that the Management Functionality is not available if you add the resource to a pre-existing cluster group. Obviously in a real world scenario this is not feasible since we cannot dictate the order in which resources are created. But as a possible workaround, I found that the resource can still be managed using the MMCV Utility just as in Win2k and Win2k3 clusters.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2011
  Same problem here: "management functionality was not visible". Did you ever find a way to get it visible?

• Anonymous
  February 07, 2011
  This is not being fixed for the current versions since there is an easy workaround as explained in the article. You need to use the MMCV utility to manager the clustered MSMQ Resource. Thanks, GautamM