vmdk's vm-workstation and change domain

Question

1. I created 4 vmdks (CA server, sql server, app server and index) from the dev instance.
2. Now I need to change their domain from old domain (crest to seacrest)
3. Do I need to add these vmdks to vm workstation and then change the domains
4. or I need to change the domains before hooking it upto vm-workstation
5. But the users are using in the old server will have old domain prefixes.

Basically, I wanted to know what are the best approaches to this?

Answer 1

Best approach if it is dev: complete rebuild. SharePoint does not move well between domains and a move usually means dismanteling the farm (after backup of course), joining the servers to the new domain and then recreating the farm using service accounts from the new domain. After this you restore the (farm) backup (not even sure this is possible cross domain, but in essence the most important things to restore are content db's, profiles and say metadata. Anything can pretty much be recreated, like a rebuilt search index.) Then, when erverything has been restored, all users in the databases are of course still old domain users. So you need to use stsadm or Powershell to 'rename' them.

Conclusion: it is only a dev machine, delete the VM's, create 4 new ones, create the domain ( using the correct name ;-) ) + service accounts and reinstall SP + VS.