Quick Fix: Installing Exchange 2019 Management Tools fails on Windows 11

Helping a co worker this morning troubleshooting the installation of Exchange 2019 Management Tools.

A second Windows 11 VM had also already been tried just to rule out anything with the OS on the machine.

The first error which appears to be a common one is the installation of the ‘IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility’ components were missing.

Trying to do this through add windows features was failing.

We used DISM from an elevated CMD to install it through the command line.

dism.exe /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility /All

Next, and the real puzzler was ‘Active Directory doesn’t exist or can not be contacted’.

This is a single domain, single domain controller environment. We were able to happily browse the sysvol folder on the domain controller, resolve its name in DNS and complete all manner of other tests. We could not see an issue.

In DNS we noted some out of date entries in Name Servers and the ForestDNSZone however clearing these out had no effect.

Remembering back to the SBS days trying to install Exchange CU, We switched to an elevated Command Prompt and the Exchange Setup Command line, which gave us a better error message and a nudge in the right direction by reporting that the domain controller was not in the same site as the client pc and could not be used.

The subnet in Sites & Services was present but not associated with the Site the Domain Controller was in.

We added the subnet to the right site, rebooted the PC and were able to complete the installation.