Persistent Group Chat appears broken after udate

After updating the Skype for Business Persistent Group Chat server I noticed that the Skype client would give me an error message:

Old messages would not load, and trying to enter new ones would simply time out.

Suspecting a back-end connection error (not able to retrieve messages from DB) I ran the Test-CsDatabase -DatabaseType PersistentChat cmdlet, but it completed with success.

Looking into Event Viewer on the Persistent Chat server showed no errors.

A quick search online gave few results, but this blog post had some similarities. Going with the suggestion that this might simply be client related I restarted the client- and voilá, it started working again! The client had been running during server update and probably just needed a kick in the “behind”.

 

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Speeding up Invoke-CsComputerFailover

As of Skype for Business server 2015 there is a new cmdlet for the update process if you are running a 3+ server pool, named Invoke-CsComputerFailover, which differs from previous versions. This cmdlet makes sure all services are drained before they are stopped, much like the older cmdlet Stop-CsWindowsService -Graceful. But where the Stop-cmdlet actually would time out if a service would’t drain, say an ongoing conference was hosted on the server, the new cmdlet will keep on forever (or at least an hour, by default).

But what if you are on a clock, maybe a maintenance window closing in?