IIS not starting on Windows 11 for ARM

Question

I recently made the transition from using a Mac with an Intel processor, to one with an M1 processor.

Being a Windows Developer, this forced me to recreate my Virtual Machines (1 have 1 per Visual Studio version), until recently each VM had 1 shared issue: a lack of a working IIS.

A rather annoying problem, but most of the stuff I do at the moment is in the desktop world, where I don't need a working IIS.

Recently I accepted a project where I would need IIS, and I was consequently very happy when I noticed Windows 11 for ARM finally does support IIS.

I decided to start from scratch and created a new VM with windows 11 pro. After installing I joined it to my Windows domain and attempted to install IIS on it.

1st attempt failed, 2nd worked flawlessly... but IIS does not want to run.

Whenever I try to start the service I get the following error:

Does anyone here have any idea what this is caused by, and what I can do to fix this?

Answer 1

It took some doing, but I ended up finding a resolution for this last problem as well...

Rather foolish as it turns out.

Whenever creating a web site, the site is created with the following settings:

The setting "Enable Emulation on ARM64" seems to be key here.

Although it actually seemed to work @ first, after I did a full install of Visual Studio it simply stopped working.

I don't really have an explanation for it, but...

Google didn't help me much, til I simple wondered what would happen if I set this one setting to false...

Well...

It works!

Answer 2

After reviewing the answers I got in my post, and also the other information I obtained through Google, I decided to try again.

I made a new virtual machine with Windows 11 ARM, activated it registered it with my Windows Domain. Then I attempted to install IIS again:

• First installed the Windows Activation Service.
• I installed IIS (a full install, including everything from the .NET Framework)

After the installation everything IIS seemed up and running. I was even able to open the default IIS start page.

Next... I installed Visual Studio 2022. For this VM I decided to go "full ARM", so I installed their latest ARM preview, which is supposed to support web dev.

For my project, I created an extra site in IIS. IIS assigned an application pool to the web site. I created a "hello world" index page, but when I tried opening I ran into an error:

I checked, and the default page also stopped working. Looking into event viewer I was shown the following error:

I googled around, found a couple of references, but no working solutions so far. The error indicates a problem with the application pools... and indeed... both pools stop immediately whenever I try to open one of the sites.

The site was configured to allow emulation on ARM64 (as was suggested by one of the posts I found)

I also did a repair of my Visual Studio installation to make certain the sdk's are properly installed (also indicated in the same post). All to no avail.

Anyone else ran into this issue?

Answer 3

Please check if the Windows Process Activation Service is installed first.

Then use the following command to start the IIS service on Windows. Run this command using the Windows Command Prompt as administrator or execute it from the Run window.

c:/> ​​iisreset /restart