Have you ever run into a problem like this before? You’ve been workin two days straight on the newly installed SharePoint 2010 Farm, everything run perfectly and you’re about to release it in production. The Network Administrator calls and says he has a problem with one of the servers. There’s a mispell in the name of the machine, and it’s not following the IT naming convention. So the server must be renamed. In the Windows Server world, this action is very easy to execute, but with a SharePoint 2010 farm, renaming a server has some consequences. In fact, the name of a server is stored in the SharePoint Configuration Database, many communications between servers member of a SharePoint Farm are based on the server name. It’s logical. Tied with the LAN DNS, changing an IP address of one of the servers has no impact if all communications are based on server name.
Because of this name retention in the configuration database, do we need to reinstall the SharePoint Application if the name is changed? Fortunally no! Again PowerShell comes at the rescue.
- First rename the server in Windows
- Run this PowerShell Command using the SharePoint 2010 Shell Command.
Rename-SPServer –Identity “wfb1″ –Name “WFE1″
The complete reference is available on TechNet.
