Exchange Management Console 2010 Initialization Failed

I am sure like me, a good number of Exchange 2010 administrators out there have had sleepless nights trying to figure out what is wrong with the new exchange 2010 server.

Recently, I was in the process of upgrading Exchange 2010 SP2 to SP3. After digesting Exchange 2010 SP3 release notes, I started the upgrading process.

Everything installed just fine. No scary errors found in the logs. restarted the exchange server and everything was fine.

When I launched the Exchange management console and get a big error "Unable to open Exchange Management Console - Initialization Failed"

The attempt to connect to http://exch.company.local/poweshell using 'Kerberos' authentication failed: Connecting to the remote server failed with the following error message: WinRM cannot process the request. The following error occurred while using Kerberos authentication: The network path was not found....

  You are responsible for all configurational changes made on your exchange server

If you come across this error, please follow the following steps

     1. In your powershell prompt, run WinRM quickconfig hit enter and accept the changes.

     2. Run iisreset

 
Go back to your console and click retry. If it doesn't work, then follow the next steps below

    1. Launch IIS Manager

    2. Expand the server -->; Sites -->; Default Web Site -->; click on PowerShell

    3. Under Powershell modules, make sure kerbauth module is enabled, module type is Native and Entry Type is Local. If it is not there, then enable it or register and enable it.

 After completing the steps above, go back to your powershell prompt and restart iis by running command 2 above.

If still no success, then we will have to get into some more config files details.

To do that, confirm the following

     1. The "Authenticated Users" group is added to the security property of your ClientAccess folder in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14

     2. Browse to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\PowerShell

     3. Make a back up of the web.config file (always make a backup before making any changes in a config file)

     4. Open the file,  find and replace file:///%ExchangeInstallDir% with file:///C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14 at this stage, we are replacing the environmental variable found in the system properties with an absolute path. If for some reason your system couldn't call the variables, then this should take care of the problem.

    5. Save the file and run iisreset

That should definitely take care of your console initialization failure.

If this problem helped you resolved your issue, please drop comments. If you have updates, also feel free to contribute.