SQL Server Configuration Manager – The server threw an exception. [0x80010105]

This post was formerly published at my beloved old blog "On the quest of a DBA's adventure......"

Whilst trying to fix another issue with SQL Server, I came across this roadblock.

When I opened SQL Server 2008 R2 – SQL Server Configuration Manager, the right hand pane had the following error “The server threw an exception. [0x80010105]”.

After some research I found Qiao Weilin’s answer on MSDN. The solution was quite simple - Restart the “Windows Management Instrumentation” service. What? WMI has screwed itself? Yeah. OoooK. So, it could be quickly fixed by Start -> Run -> “Services.msc”, scroll down to “Windows Management Instrumentation”, right-click and “Restart”. Now you’ll have to close and re-open the SQL Server Configuration Manager, and you should now see a full list of SQL Server Services.

But what does exactly happen? Will it happen again? In short, yes. After some research on why this happened, I came across a number of  blog posts (some of those are not SQL Server related issue) which are all pointing their finger toward WMI. Apparently, WMI component may chew too much memory in a super slow manner or say, memory leak. This could take weeks, or even months, to shows up the symptom. Typically you can find this similar error message on the event log:

Log Name: Application
Source: Application Error
Date: 28/03/2011 2:29:23 AM
Event ID: 1000
Task Category: (100)
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: SomeSQLServer.SomeDomain.com
Description:
Faulting application name: wmiprvse.exe, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc794
Faulting module name: ole32.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16624, time stamp: 0x4c2984e3
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000393a9
Faulting process id: 0x39c0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cbec1ae56bf838
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\wbem\wmiprvse.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\ole32.dll Report Id: fd7b71e2-5886-11e0-a7af-005056a30040

Apparently MS has come up with a hot-fix for the issue and this hot-fix is now included in the Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 as well. Here is the reference:

WMI leaks memory on Server 2008 R2 monitored agents

Hotfix: The "Win32_Service" WMI class leaks memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 and in Windows