Monday, March 27, 2017

Decomission That Old Server (Move Extranet Service)



So you have an old Web Front End server. It has been a good ‘un (as we say in the south) a real work horse, but for numerous different reasons, it is time to “decommission” the ole gal and get a new work horse in place. You are going to keep the old WFE in place while you build up a new one and get them to look identical before taking the old one offline. One problem, you notice you are running this extranet service and you cannot get it installed on the new server. What is a horse farmer, I mean server admin to do?

First, Add the new server to the farm. Provision all necessary services except those that can only run on one server (like UPS and probably Search topology and of course the Extranet Service). For the rest of these steps, I will only focus on the ExCMExtranetService, additional services will need to be deployed as needed in your environment.



Next, stop the ExCM Service.






Once stopped, delete the ExCM service application (if there is one). Now you are ready to remove the extranet service using the Remove-ExCMExtranetService.



Now you are ready to remove the server from the farm.

With the old server out of the farm, you will want to retract and redeploy the ExCM solution. Now, you will need to start the service on the new farm. The way the service gets started is when you activate certain features of ExCM; features like Extranet Account Managers, Authentication Provider Mapping, user automation, etc. Chances are you have already activated these features, which is why you see the service in your farm to begin with. If you do not need to activate one of these features, then you can also start the service by running the “New-ExCMExtranetService”


As you can see from the below screenshot, I now have the service running on the new server.





Lastly, browse out to your extranet site and ensure that you can log in. Enjoy!

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