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A customer recently reported that they were not able to create any new Site Collections within any Web Application in their SharePoint 2013 UAT environment. Instead of being able to create a new Site Collection they repeatedly received the error shown in the image below.

I in order to troubleshoot this issue I tried creating a Site Collection myself while monitoring the ULS logs. An event with an ID of 8307 was appearing in the logs each time I tried to create a new Site Collection. This event had a message of “An exception occurred in Forms claim provider when calling SPClaimProvider.FillResolve(): Provider must implement the class ‘System.Web.Security.MembershipProvider’. (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\34596\web.config line 606)”.

This suggested a problem with the web.config for the Central Administration Web Application and an error with a Membership provider. Forms Based Authentication (FBA) has been used to configure FBA in this environment so I continued exploring this avenue further.

I reviewed the web.config at the line indicated from the event and noticed that there were multiple entries for FBA membership and role providers. I removed these duplicate entries and was able to create Site Collections without any problems then.

As the Forms Based Authentication in this environment was configured using the FBA Configuration Manager I can only think that this was at fault somehow – the odd thing is that the same tool was also used on to configure the production environment which I also confirmed was not also having the same issue.

I would suggest that after using the FBA Configuration Manager to configure FBA that you ensure you can create new Site Collections. It’s certainly something I am going to be including to my deployment checklist!