Document Conversions Load Balancer Service fails to start after May 2015 CU – SharePoint 2010

After installing May 2015 CU for SharePoint 2010 and running PSConfig,it complains that it cannot start ‘loadbalancerserviceinstance’ and warns you to start it manually. PSconfig continues further without any issues and sucessfully upgrades.

Here is the exact warning message PSConfig throws – ‘Failed to start loadbalancerserviceinstance on this server. Start this service manually‘

Issue starts when you try to start Document Conversions Load Balancer Service manually through UI.

Browse to Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server -> Select the server name from drop down -> Start – ‘Document Conversions Load Balancer Service’. It tries for sometime, changes status to Starting and errors out with Status as ‘Error Starting‘.

 

Whenever I have issues doing something through UI, usually i fall back to PowerShell to get the job done for me.
I tried to start the service through PowerShell.

It started ‘Provisioning’ the service and ended up in the same broken state.

Then I found a clue about the issue when going through the Event viewer errors.
Found 2 events 7960 & 7953. Both the errors complained about the same registry key.

Error: Not launching Document Conversions Laod Balancer because registry key acknowledging service running on app server (‘AcknowledgedRunningOnAppServer’) is not set.

 

Browsed through the registry and did not find the above specified key at all. Ran into this KB article (KB2910363) which helped me in solving the issue. Even though the fix specified is for SharePoint 2013, it worked in SharePoint 2010 as well. It might be a new thing introduced with the update.

‘The document-conversion services that were obsoleted in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 are not secure when the services run in an environment in which the web front-end (WFE) server role is located on the server that is running as an application server (that is, on the same server as the services)’

Above statement is extracted from the KB2910363 article, which is true in my case. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service is also running in Application server in which I am facing the issue.

Document Conversions Load Balancer Service is checking for ‘AcknowledgedRunningOnAppServer’ registry key before starting the service. When the registry key is missing, it is throwing up an error.

Resolution: Create a new DWORD key entry called ‘AcknowledgedRunningOnAppServer’ and set the value to ‘1’ in the following two locations

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15\LauncherSettings
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15\LoadBalancerSettings

Start the service after setting this key and it starts without further adieu! Hope this helps someone.