Provider load failure when scheduling a backup plan
We had a couple of customers facing an issue where TFS backup schedule wizard was failing with an error "Provider load failure" when they tried to schedule a backup plan, which included SSRS encryption key.
It failed at the readiness checks with a stack similar to below
+-+-+-+-+-| Verifying Reporting Services encryption key can be backed up |+-+-+-+-+-
Starting Node: ENCRYPTIONKEY
NodePath : Container/Progress/Conditional/ENCRYPTIONKEY
Node returned: Error
Provider load failure
Completed VerifyBackupEncryptionKeyOperation: Error
The error stack pointed to a WMI provider load failure. WMI is uses by TFS tool to take a backup of the SSRS key. However the backup of SSRS key succeeded from the SSRS configuration manager.
Also the backup plan scheduling succeeded, if the reporting databases were skipped.
We did some investigation and found the reason for the failure.
We found that this issue started happening after an upgrade from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2012.
Due to some reason there were two namespaces for the same SSRS instance. One corresponded to the level of SQL 2008 R2 (level 10) and another corresponded to the SQL 2012(level 11).
As there were two WMI name spaces for the same instance the backup tool threw an error as the name space for the older version can no longer be used.
Here is how we found the issue (how you can see if you are facing the same issue)
- We launched wbemtest.exe on the SSRS server.
- Used connect option to select the namespace root\microsoft\sqlserver\reportserver\rs_<instance>
- Ran the query "select * from __NameSpace"
- It showed up 2 versions, v10 and v11, with v10 being for 2008 and v11 being for 2012.
To fix the issue we took a backup of the v10 namespace and then deleted it.
The backup plan scheduling succeeded after that.
Content created by – Venkat & Aparna
Content Reviewed by – Romit Gulati