Morning,
This can now be closed, the problem with our install in case anyone else experiences these issue was to do with internet connectivity and firewalls. Even though we are licensed for dongles on our servers which should not need to access the wowza license servers, when the wowza service start and tries to bind to port 8087, the Wowza service tries to contact the licensing servers on the internet. Our firewalls would deny this flow and hold the communication port open which would stall the startup of the service. The fix was to explicitly allow access to the license servers (even though we are licensed with dongles) and the service would start normally. Hope this helps.