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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.