There is no solution under deployment or retraction but still showing the error "update-spsolution : A deployment or retraction is already under way."

Question

I have deployed a wsp SPSolution.wsp on a web application. After a few days I needed to update this wsp, so I made changes in the solution and published the wsp. Now when I executed Update-SPSolution command. By looking at the status which changed from "Deploying" to "Deployed" in solution management in central admin, we can assume the wsp got updated. But I didn't see the changes I made so after thinking a lot I re-published the wsp and re-executed update command. And voila! I saw the error

update-spsolution : A deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution "SPSolution.wsp", and
only one deployment or retraction at a time is supported.

Now, I don't see any deployment or retraction under way for any solution. In fact I confirmed it via stsadm -o enumdeployments which shows <Deployments Count="0" /> count=0.

That means no deployment/retraction is under way, right? So, do you have any idea what might be happening over here?

Answer 1

The deployment step for a farm solution creates a timer job. This timer job is used by the timer service on each web server in the server farm. The timer job also uses the SharePoint Foundation Administrative web service to access appropriate privileges to deploy solution files to each computer, so both services must be running on all servers for the deployment to succeed.

If the deployment step is in its initial setup, and the deployment timer job has not yet started running on any of the deployment targets, the deployment job can be canceled. In such cases, the timer job is removed.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544500(v=office.14).aspx

You can try to restart SPTimer Service on each server.

Answer 2

In you situation couple of things you have to check.

• Make Sure the SharePoint timer service and SharePoint admin service is running on all servers in the farm. if one of the service stop in any server of the farm will cause this issue.
• To check the timer job, go to central admin > monitoring > Check job Status...onbt his page click on "Running Jobs", over here you will see all the running jobs. Looks for ""Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Solution Deployment for %SolutionName.wsp" and if it exist then this page also tells u on which server it stuck.
  • Now you can delete that job or restart the timer and admin service on the server.

Answer 3

Try restart servers in farm and after this retract or deploy with -force.