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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.
Hosk's Dynamic Blog 
Useful post, thanks for sharing your experiences.
It should be possible to dig out of a hole like this by cheating the DNS records by creating static host entries for the old name, pointing to the new server (and assuming the old server is now offline of course). Given enough time to reinstall that seems a perfectly valid option too, but maybe would not always be an option by then.
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I was lucky in some ways that I had only just setup the CRM server so I was quite confident that I could reinstall it quickly because I had done that the day before.
I think the main problem was the computer name is mentioned in the active directory groups and I’m not convinced the repair function changes the active directory groups. I have no basis for this but it’s just a guess
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The active directory setting only become an issue normally only when looking to move a CRM organisation from one domain to another rather than a server name change (though to be fair as this is a local dev VM I had both on one server). Anyways great article which led me to give it a whirl in 2016 – feel free to add any nuggets you may have picked up since. https://wordpress.com/post/antonyellisdynamicscrm.wordpress.com/1143
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Sorry wrong link try again! https://antonyellisdynamicscrm.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/crm-2016-problems-after-renaming-the-crm-server/
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