Error 0x800f0922 while adding DHCP role on Windows Server

Error 0x800f0922 while adding DHCP role on Windows Server

If you are installing the DHCP server role on a Windows Server machine you might get the following 0x800f0922 error message:

Feature Installation

The request to add or remove features on the specified server failed.

Installation of one or more roles, role services, or features failed. Error: 0x800f0922

It actually turns out the reason behind this is very simple but somewhat dumb I think. If you already have an active DHCP server on your network then you are going to get error 0x800f0922 thrown every time you try to install another DHCP server. This makes sense specially back in the old day when having multiple DHCP servers was a bad idea as there is no shared central database to keep lease information and IP conflicts may arise from it (two or more computers with the same IP address). So the reason why I think this behavior is not ideal is because a simple warning/pre-requisite check would be more informative than a plain old error code. Furthermore, Windows 2012 Server allows you to have more than one DHCP server to balance or fail over. So based on that functionality it should let you install as now it is a valid scenario for an infrastructure.

So, to install the DHCP server the solution is simple (and perhaps obvious once you understand what throws the error 0x800f0922): Install the DHCP server by doing either one of the following two things first:

• Disconnect the server from the network so it does not detect another active DHCP server
• Temporarily Stop other DHCP servers on your network

And after that, at least to me, the DHCP server role installs successfully and no more 0x800f0922 errors.