I'm running SP2013 Enterprise and this is in my QA environment, not production. Recently my WFE became unresponsive. I removed it from the farm, ran get-SPproducts -local on the other servers (2 APP Servers, one of which is dedicated to SSRS) and then readded the WFE to the farm. This fixed the issue with the WFE not responding.
However the Health Analyzer started displaying "This Distributed Cache host may cause cache reliability problems." on the WFE. The AppFabric Caching Service is showing disabled in the services. When I run Get-CacheHost is shows as DOWN. The other 2 hosts are UP.
When I looked at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AppFabric\V1.0\Configuration the ConnectionString and Provider values were empty so I looked at a healthy host and added those values in. I left the AdminConfigured and ServiceConfigured values set to 0, even though these were set to 1 on the healthy host, thinking this was set once the host was started up.
When I run 'Start-CacheHost –ComputerName WFE –CachePort 22233'
it returns:
Start-CacheHost : Cannot start service AppFabricCachingService on computer'WFE.Company.Local'. At line:1 char:1 + Start-CacheHost -ComputerName WFE -CachePort 22233 + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Start-AFCacheHost], InvalidOperationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.InvalidOperationException,Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Commands.StartAFCacheHostCommand
Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance did not return an error howver the AppFabric Caching Service did not start up.
There is quite a bit of guidance out there on troubleshooting and getting a host set up, or restarted. Before I try anything else I thought I'd get some feedback and suggestions from folks here.