Distributed Cache service stuck in Starting Provisioning

Question

Hello,
I'm having problem with starting/stopping Distributed Cache service in one of the SharePoint 2013 farm servers. Initially, Distributed Cache was enabled in all the farm servers by default and it was running as a cluster. I wanted to remove it from all hosts
but one (APP server) using below PowerShell commands, which worked fine.
Stop-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance -Graceful
Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance
But later I attempted to add the service back to two hosts (WFE servers) using below command and unfortunately one of them got stuck in the process. When I look at the Services on Server from Central Admin, the status says "Starting".
Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance
Also, when I execute below script, the status says "Provisioning".
Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq "SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService"} | select Server, Status
I get "cacheHostInfo is null" error when I use "Stop-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance -Graceful".
I tried below script,
$instanceName ="SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService" 
$serviceInstance = Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq $instanceName -and ($_.server.name) -eq $env:computername}
$serviceInstance.Unprovision()
$serviceInstance.Delete()
,but it didn't work either, and I got below error.
"SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance", could not be deleted because other objects depend on it.  Update all of these dependants to point to null or 
different objects and retry this operation.  The dependant objects are as follows: 
SPServiceInstanceJobDefinition Name=job-service-instance-{GUID}
Has anyone come across this issue? I would appreciate any help.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi ,
Are you able to ping the server that is already running Distributed Cache on this server? For example:
ping WFE01
As you are using more than one cache host in your server farm, you must configure the first cache host running the Distributed Cache service to allow Inbound ICMP (ICMPv4) traffic through the firewall.If an administrator removes the first cache host from
the cluster which was configured to allow Inbound ICMP (ICMPv4) traffic through the firewall, you must configure the first server of the new cluster to allow Inbound ICMP (ICMPv4) traffic through the firewall. 
You can create a rule to allow the incoming port.
For more information, you can refer to the  blog:
http://habaneroconsulting.com/insights/Distributed-Cache-Needs-Ping#.U4_nmPm1a3A
Thanks,
Eric
Forum Support
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