“Communication with the underlying transaction manager has failed.”

Why would the following error message occur?:

“Communication with the underlying transaction manager has failed.”

I also got the following inner exception in case this helps:

{“The MSDTC transaction manager was unable to pull the transaction from the source transaction manager due to communication problems. Possible causes are: a firewall is present and it doesn’t have an exception for the MSDTC process, the two machines cannot find each other by their NetBIOS names, or the support for network transactions is not enabled for one of the two transaction managers. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004D02B)”}

A:

If you read the inner exception it mentions the Firewall. For some reason Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 display a Firewall message and users may be mislead into the idea that they have just opened the ports for the Transaction Manager to work. You actually have to open the Firewall and enable those exception which will be on the list (no need to remember ip ports and create your own rule). Do this both at the server and the client and it should work.