SP2013 + Win2012: Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running

I’ve just been fighting an issue with SharePoint 2013 Foundation – the search functionality specifically. Once I’d provisioned a search application via the wizard, the health status of the service wasn’t available despite the fact the administration service was started. There are known issues for using this on Windows Server 2008 R2 (https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/sharepoint-server-2013-known-issues-HA102919021.aspx#_Search) but this was on Windows 2012 so none of the patches applied.

The problem was that none of the noderunner.exe instances would not stay loaded when restarting the admin service (which would trigger new node-runner instances) and would give this error:

“Content Plugin can not be initialized - list of CSS addresses is not set.”

…and…

“Unexpected exception in node activator: System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added.

• at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add)
• at Microsoft.Ceres.CoreServices.Node.BootstrapPropertyLoader.AddEnvironmentProperties(IDictionary`2 result)
• at Microsoft.Ceres.CoreServices.Node.NodeActivator.InitializeBootstrapProperties(IDictionary`2 overlay)
• at Microsoft.Ceres.CoreServices.Node.NodeActivator.ActivateNode(IDictionary`2 configuration)”

In a normal SharePoint 2013 search server, it’s normal to see at least 3-4 node-runners loaded even when there’s no crawling happening but here there were none.

Cause

In the end it ended up being a trailing whitespace on an environmental variable that caused the failure in this instance.

If your “SharePoint Search Host Controller” service isn’t started (SPSearchHostController) then all bets are off – that needs to be started & this solution isn’t for you. If on the other hand this service seems to be perfectly healthy and the search admin page is still saying “Unable to retrieve topology component health states” then the below solution might be for you.

Solution

Remove any trailing white-space from any environmental variables “PSModulePath” & reboot – there may be more than one instance of this variable name listed. Your server should now load noderunner.exe properly and your search topology should now be reported correctly.

Also: quite a common practise I’ve seen on the internet for search configuration is a memory limit for the node-runner process. Do not limit the memory as this kills the SharePoint crawler & remember, SP search is expected to consume up-to 24gb. This might seem like a lot but most smart-phones these days come with 4-8gb of RAM – this is enterprise crawling, indexing and searching we’re talking about here so 24gb really isn’t much when you think of it like that.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2013
  i see this in my test environment, after modifying the environmental variable, i don't need to Reboot windows, i just stop and restart the search host controller service in central administration->services on server. I can see that the restarted service process get the new environmental variable in process explorer

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2013
  Restarting just the service wasn't enough for my test for some reason, but yeah in theory that's possible.

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2013
  Hi Sam, Your work around works also for W2k8 r2. Thanks

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2013
  Good to know - cheers!

• Anonymous
  December 23, 2013
  here is one more scenario that I faced for the same error message...thought might be useful to someone aseempandit.wordpress.com/.../unable-to-retrieve-the-search-application-topology

• Anonymous
  June 14, 2014
  Excellent Sam, this helped me in fixing the search in my lab.

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2014
  I have limited knowledge about PowerShell modules, can you please help me to get to the screen shown there.