How to Remove a Server (WFE/APP) from SharePoint Farm?

How to remove SharePoint server from farm?
As per the Technet article, Remove a server from a farm in SharePoint 2013, Use Add/Remove Programs from “Control Panel” to remove SharePoint 2007/2010/2013 servers from the Farm.

  • Control Panel >> Add/Remove programs >> Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 >> Remove

Make sure that the user account performing this procedure is a member of the Local Administrators group.

However, If you try to rebuild SharePoint on the server, I would prefer to use the “Disconnect this server from farm” option on PSCONFIG wizard. To remove the SharePoint server from the farm, Run “SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard” (psconfigui) and choose “Disconnect from this server farm option” and then run through the wizard.

how to remove a server from sharepoint farm

Once the wizard completed successfully on the server that you want to remove from the farm, that server won’t be part of your SharePoint farm anymore! You can run the wizard again to join the server at anytime if needed.

Simply choosing “Remove Server” option without above steps in “Servers in farm” page will cause undesirable results such as timer-job failures.

Remove SharePoint server from farm with PowerShell:

Here is the PowerShell way to remove SharePoint server from farm. Run this PowerShell command from the target server:

Disconnect-SPConfigurationDatabase -Confirm:$false 

PSCONFIG command line to remove a SharePoint server from an existing farm:

psconfig -cmd configdb -disconnect

Basically, these command line and PowerShell cmdlets does the same things as SharePoint Products Configuration wizards disconnecting server from farm. But wait! Are we completely done? No! There could be several artifacts left in the server such as Server Roles, IIS directories, Logs, Registry keys, etc. So, I would recommend doing a fresh install of OS and SharePoint for a clean server rebuild.

To remove a database server from a farm, move any databases stored on that server to a different database server and then click Remove Server from Manage Servers in the farm page.

Salaudeen Rajack

Salaudeen Rajack - Information Technology Expert with Two-decades of hands-on experience, specializing in SharePoint, PowerShell, Microsoft 365, and related products. He has held various positions including SharePoint Architect, Administrator, Developer and consultant, has helped many organizations to implement and optimize SharePoint solutions. Known for his deep technical expertise, He's passionate about sharing the knowledge and insights to help others, through the real-world articles!

8 thoughts on “How to Remove a Server (WFE/APP) from SharePoint Farm?

  • Hey, I have cloned a SP server, but on running the SP config Wizard i get the error “cannot join this farm because it contains server assigned to the single server farm role. To join an additional server to this farm, first disconnect server from the farm and then try again”
    I tried multiple ways, Uninstalled from Control Panel, tried powerShell command, but end up with the same error

    Reply
  • Hi I removed a server with PSConfig wizard successfully but I still see the server in CA although its status show “Not Configured”.. Do I need to also select the “Remove Server” in CA to completely remove it? just want to know if that is a require step in the remove server process.

    Reply
  • If you disconnect a server from a farm, will it automatically re-provision any services it hosted onto other servers? Or does that need to be done manually before disconnecting it from the farm? The reason I ask is because I’m working on a project to upgrade the hardware of our SP farms. I’ll be removing servers from the farm one at a time and swapping in the new server. Trying to determine if I’ll first need to go into Services on Server and re-provision anything in which the server was the only one running it.

    Reply
    • Did you find any solution to it?

      Reply
  • I have app and front end server setup.How to remove app server and change front end server to app server.

    Reply
  • Basically I installed a CU on an Application server that I didn’t want to install so I am trying to figure out if I should snap the VM back to a state before I installed the CU patch or should I just remove this server from the farm since it is not really doing anything then I can rebuild form scratch and add back to the farm? It sounds like I should just remove and add like your page suggest but just wanted to check to see if that could cause any unforeseen issues?

    Thanks Robert

    Reply

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