Web Application not getting created on all Web Front ends?

If you ever run into a situation where your farm suddenly fails to create the web application on all front end web servers, in other words it only gets created on the server running central admin, one good indication of that will be that the screen shown here: 

Which normally advises you that the web application was created and would you like to know more about FBA (forms based authentication) will not appear. 


 Instead you will see a screen that says the page can not be displayed by Internet explorer, similar to the one shown here:

 

This starts to occur when the process model shutdown time limit for the application pool that runs central admin is not long enough.  This is usually due to one or a combination of the farm not having enough resources, being overworked due to more than 20 web applications, or numerous extended web applications.

 

 

The detailed steps for this blog post are found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543306

 

Here are the high level steps to resolve this issue:

 

Logon to your server that runs central admin

Open IIS Manager (inetmgr.exe)

Right click on the Central Administration application pool

Select Advanced Settings

increase the Shutdown Time Limit for the Process Model from the default of 90 seconds to something higher, e.g. 300 Seconds.

 

 

 

 

You're good to go now; but you should check and delete the web application that didn't replicate and make sure it was removed from the physical path of IIS before you attempt to recreate.  Check all servers in your farm that have SharePoint binaries installed.

 

 

Before I knew this trick, I was adding and removing servers from the farm to get the web application to replicate, adjusting the process model shutdown time limit is much faster,

 

Cheers