How to correctly remove one server from a farm?

Question

We need to convert and old test farm to dev farm, and therefore we want everything on one server.

I already started all services on the server that were started on the first. Then I shutdown the server.

In order to test, I just check the logs and I saw this error on the running server, but the url is from the 2nd server.

SharePoint Web Services Round Robin Service Load Balancer Event: EndpointFailure Process Name: OWSTIMER Process ID: 5584 AppDomain Name: DefaultDomain AppDomain ID: 1 Service Application Uri: urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:service:81580588071846cdaa84776b1c471938#authority=urn:uuid:7cdc6e04cfa64336996f673f8be91045&authority=https://be-server:32844/Topology/topology.svc Active Endpoints: 1 Failed Endpoints:1 Affected Endpoint: http://be-server:32843/81580588071846cdaa84776b1c471938/ProfileService.svc

Answer 1

There are alot of "what-if's" regarding how your services are hosted, so to simplify I take it your TEST server was a two server farm (APP/WFE + WFE), and you are removing the WFE server, and that no service application instance was only running on WFE server.

The official guidance from TechNet say that you:

1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Administrators group on the local server computer.
2. On the server that you want to remove from the farm, click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Programs and Features.
3. In the list of currently installed programs, click SharePoint Server 2010, and then click Uninstall.
4. Click Continue at the confirmation prompt to uninstall the program.

However what I normally do is to run SharePoint Configuration Wizard from Start menu (the "Grey Wizard" mind you) and choose "Disconnect from this server farm". Since you want to reuse the server in a DEV environment this should be enough for you instead of uninstalling the bits completely.

Answer 2

when you want to remove the server from Central Admin you will see the following useful alert:

It is recommended that you uninstall SharePoint Products from the server, rather than removing the server from this page. Because the Remove Server operation does not delete information from the server, such as any registry keys that were set, use this operation only when the server is no longer available. Do you want to continue and remove the server?