Recently I need to re-run the VMs of the CRM server setup on my test and practice machine. One of the stuff that I would like to test is to establish trust relationship between ADFS from one to another CRM deployments, therefore, I need to start my ADFS VMs. On one of the instance of the ADFS server, the ADFS won’t start for unknown reason and I got this error message when I looked at the event viewer: The Active Directory Federation Services service terminated with the following error: An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request.

The error message is seems to be generic exception message without any further details provided. After a quick research and looking around at the event viewer, I found more descriptive error message on: Applications and Services Log > AD FS > Admin

The error message described the connection to SQL could not be established, as my practice ADFS setup is using internal database, it turned out to be the Windows Internal Database service is stopped.