Exchange 2016 - Powershell Virtual Directory not working

So one of the projects that I have been working on lately is to setup a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution for my company. One of the requirement to get email to Sync for the mobile devices was to connect the MDM server to our internal Exchange 2016 server using PowerShell.

One of the issues that I had been running into for a few days was that the MDM was not able to authenticate to our Exchange Server. I went through everything I could think of to fix this issue and to get it working (Check Firewall ports, SSL Certificates, User Permissions) but nothing was working. Then I remembered back to an post I did on here before about Active Sync and how I had to use a PowerShell command to recreate the Virtual Directory with the correct URL at the time of creation otherwise it will cause PowerShell to fail when you try to connect to it externally.

Well the funny thing about this whole situation is that during my troubleshooting I had to remove the PowerShell virtual directory in order to recreate it. Well... It turns out when you remove the PowerShell directory it also disconnects your PowerShell session to the Exchange server. Now fortunately I have a second Exchange server on the same Domain so I was able to run the command to create a new PowerShell Virtual Directory on that server and after turning off the Require SSL check box I was able to connect to the server again. Also my connection to the MDM Server was working as well!!!

Here is the command s that I should have used to create the PowerShell Virtual Directory.

To Remove the PowerShell Virtual Directory:

Remove-PowerShellVirtualDirectory “Powershell (Default Web Site)”



To Create the New Virtual Directory:

New-PowerShellVirtualDirectory -Name Powershell -RequireSSL:$False



To Reset IIS

IISRESET /noforce