User Profile Synchronization Service fails to start in SharePoint 2010
Posted by Jason on May 6, 2010 in Administrators | 4 comments
When configuring the User Profile Synchronization in SharePoint 2010 you might find that the User Profile Synchronization Service does not start in the Central Administration -> Services on Server and you get an error in the Windows Event Log like:
The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ProfileSynchronizationSetupJob (ID 7e4cb036-298f-45b2-8b6a-4e3c2c79be0a) threw an exception. More information is included below. An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object UserProfileApplication Name=User Profile Service Application was updated by DOMAIN\user, in the OWSTIMER (1532) process, on machine SP2010DEV. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.
This happened to me and here’s what I did to get it working…
When you start this service you are prompted to re-enter the credentials for your farm account.
After doing this the service sits there “Starting” for quite some time before showing as “Stopped” again and the event log shown above appears in the Windows Application Log.
What’s happening in the background is a SharePoint timer job runs to configure the service which eventually fails.
I then added my SharePoint farm administrator account to the local Windows Administrators security group (don’t worry this in only temporary while we configure the service) and rebooted the server (not sure if the reboot was necessary). When I setup SharePoint I did not add my farm account to the local Windows Administrators group. In fact this is the recommendation by Microsoft to run SharePoint under the least required privileges.
After rebooting I started the User Profile Synchronization Service. The timer job completed without any errors and was able to verify the two Forefront Identity Manager services were configured with the correct user and started.
Finally I removed the SharePoint farm account from the Administrators group.
Thanks a lot! You totally answered my questions.
This worked for me as well. I did not originally install with the farm account in the Local Admin group. So per your post, I added the account to the Local Admin group, started the service successfully, then removed from the Local Admin group. Everything seems to be running fine so far. Pretty weird.
Where did you see that Microsoft recommends initially installing with the farm account in the Local Admin group?
Hi Jess,
I didn’t find a recommendation from Microsoft anywhere. I did this by trial and error to get it working initially.
Thanks! Worked for me too.