This just gave me an opportunity to write after a long time and I did not think twice. It’s a bit of patching but it worked for me.

I was installing SharePoint on one of my VM machine when I came across the below mentioned error. I tried bing / google, for the error but found nothing.

Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception
Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: A failure occurred SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance::Provision() Available memory is '151' MB, needed memory'165' MB
at Microsoft.SharePoint.DistributedCaching.Utilities.SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance.Provision()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Join()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

This is a new VM and I am configuring it on Windows Server 8 Hyper-V. Don’t get me wrong this has nothing to do with Windows Server 8. The VM had 1024 MB as initial memory and configured to increase up to 2048 MB (dynamic memory).

Now, let’s quickly have a flash back on the TechNet article, which talks about the H/W requirement for SharePoint installation.

Putting the troubleshooting hat now, I ran the Configuration Wizard again and since the error clearly mentions that the setup was short of memory, I used Task Manager and was keeping an eye on memory consumption. Wow, even though I had 2048 MB (dynamic memory) configured, the VM never asked for more than 1024 MB and failed when 151 MB was left.

Resolution: Configured VM with 2048 MB (could have been lesser) of initial memory and limit up to 3072 MB.

The setup went smooth without any errors.

Hope this helps,
Vivek Kumbhar