Ran into a issue where Skype for Business frontend service refused to start. It remained in starting for ages before giving up. In the event viewer the statement was : Server startup is being delayed because fabric pool manager is initializing. This event seemed to have something to do regarding pool, but this was a standardedition Skype for Business setup containing one frontend and one edge server.
Many articles on Bing and Google explained how this could be a issue with the certificates on the server, but in our case the frontend server and edge server was happily replicating the topology. We started by trying to do as the event told us:
Reset-CsPoolRegistrarState -poolfqdn <ourpool> -ResetType QuorumLossRecovery
But this also failed. For me it looked like there was something wrong with WindowsFabric. Compared with another SfB server and in taskmanager I could see fabric.exe running, but not on on the server with the issue. Looking in eventviewer Microsoft/WindowsFabric Admin:
At first I tried to install Windows Fabric from SfB install media. But same error. Then we tried to uninstall and reinstall. This resulted in a more serious error. Now the server has lost its connections to the Fabric. So how do we fix this. My solution was to uninstall SfB frontend server module and then run the Deployment wizard to reinstall it with config from the management store. This worked perfect. The front end service started immediately.