CRM 2011 – Problems after Renaming the CRM Server

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I had to rename the server which was hosting CRM 2011 today.  This as you can imagine is something that CRM 2011 didn’t like and instantly stopped working as soon as I had done it.

The reason I was doing something as silly as renaming the CRM server was because I had upgraded CRM 4 to CRM 2011 and to do this with the least amount of disruption to the users I left the current server up and running and got everything ready on another server.

They didn’t want the url of CRM to change so I had to do the upgrade and then rename the server later.  There probably is a better way to do this but I’m sure there will be other people who will have to rename a CRM server machine at some point, so I thought I would tell you what I did to fix it.

CRM 2011 has lots of links to it’s server name, in the active directory groups it creates (4 or 5 of them) and probably in some configuration files and the MSCRM_CONFIG database.

I initially tried to repair the CRM deployment.  You can do this by going to Control/Add Remove programs and choose the repair option on program.  I then tried a reboot but I was still getting errors.

I read this blog discussing the issue

http://msdynamicscrmblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/issues-after-re-naming-ms-crm-servers.html

and this forum

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crmdeployment/thread/61f50c87-f75e-467b-8e98-ef54202f6cdb

luckily I already installed CRM 2011 twice for this one installation, so I was confident of quickly uninstalling and installing it again.  I decided the quickest way to resolve this problem was a reinstall because I then new this would store the correct computer name in all the correct configs and active directory groups.

Also I didn’t have permissions to tinker with the active directory groups.

After the reinstall it worked perfectly.  I ran the Rollup 3 update and then imported the organisation and then it was working.

It’s surprising that you can install CRM 2011 so quickly but most of the hard work is getting the servers ready for the install and once you have the server in the correct state with the prerequisites all set then un-installing and installing isn’t too bad.

CRM 2011 – restoring a CRM database from Enterprise edition to Standard edition

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Today I was trying to bring some CRM database from one server and restoring them to another.

I backed up the databases and then was trying to in restore the database on the database for another CRM environment.

I was getting an error when trying to restore the database.

"Database cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server" error when restoring a Microsoft Dynamics CRM database
I had no idea what this problem was, after a bit of googling and then I worked out how to find out what version of SQL SERVER I was using on the two different instances
if you run a new SQL query on the system master database
SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')
This returned
(No column name)	(No column name)	(No column name)
10.50.1600.1	           RTM	                Standard Edition (64-bit)
and
(No column name)	(No column name)	(No column name)
10.50.1600.1	            RTM	                Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
so basically I had two mismatched versions of SQL Server.
I then found this Microsoft KB article with the solution

The cause of the problem was this
When Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is installed using a Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition, 
a partition is created for the auditing functionality of Dynamics CRM 2011. 
The AuditBase table uses partitioning which is only available for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise.

If you then run the script on that page, then back up the database.  You can then restore this database on a standard version of SQL server 2008.

Then to create a new organisation you go into the Deployment manager and choose import organisation, it will recognise any CRM databases that do not already exist on that CRM deployment.  It will then run through adding the details to the MSCRM_CONIG database and if all goes well you should have imported your organisation.