Uninstalling Primary EV server?

[pwm11]

We've replaced our EV servers by standing up new hardware and moving all services, tasks, and vault stores to the new machines. Now, we'd like to uninstall EV from the old servers. All servers are running EV9.2. I read that uninstalling EV on the primary server associated with the DirectoryService database would actually remove the DB altogether. I certainly don't want that to happen :)...

How can I confirm which server is truly our primary, and then how can I safely uninstall EV from that server without removing the DB?

Thank you in advance!

[tmurray1]

I think you are asking which server is the designated Directory Server.  If this is the question then you can open the VAC and check properties of the Enterprise Vault node.  This will show the Dirctory Service Computer.

[pwm11]

Thanks for the reply. When I check that location in the VAC, it displays whichever server I chose when I first opened the VAC. For example, I have 4 EV servers, and I can specify any of them as the Directory Service Computer when I open VAC. I'm trying to understand if there really is such a thing as the "primary" server since I need to uninstall EV on the old servers. An article from Symantec states:

"If you uninstall Enterprise Vault on the primary Enterprise Vault server that is associated with the Directory database, the Directory database will also be removed." (see http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO28210)

I'm trying to figure out what that means and how to work around it. I assume one of the oldl servers is the primary, but I'm not sure which one, and I was wondering if there was any way to uninstall EV without removing the DB as well.

Thanks!

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Well since Enterprise Vault 6, there is really no such thing as a "Primary" server anymore.
In Enterprise Vault 5 and below it would be typical to have one server that would run directory service and none of the others would, but in EV6 and above, each and every EV server has its own Directory service as not to create a single point of failure.

What you would have to do is the following

1. Find your Site Alias and make sure it resolves to a machine that you wish to keep
Easiest way to check the "Site Alias" is to go to your Archives, and find any old user archive, and then go to the Advanced tab, you will see a long GUID with a site alias at the end of it. This is a DNS Alias that if you were to ping it, should resolve to an EV Server.

So if you get the ArchiveID that looks like 1000077546AB82DFB243E22C23B0159A1110000myEVSite
If you go to a command prompt and type 'ping myEVSite' it should respond with something like

Pinging EVServer.myDomain.com [192.168.10.1] with 32 bytes of data

If the machine you are looking to remove comes back from that ping, then you will need to update your DNS alias to point "myEVSite" to something like "EVServer2.myDomain.com"


2. Move all data off of the primary EV Server, delete the tasks, delete the services and delete the server

To fully remove the Enterprise Vault server from the environment you are going to have to make sure that no data is associated with the server, so any vault stores and indexes you have will need to be moved to another EV Server to take over that new data.

If the data still is associated with the server, then you cannot delete the services.
Once everything is moved and updated in the database, you can then delete all the tasks and services and finally just delete the machine from the Vault Admin Console.

After that has occured, you can then uninstall EV altogether, reformat the machine or whatever you wish to do.

Tony Sterling wrote a good article about this previously

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-remove-ev-server-your-site

[pwm11]

Thanks for the quick answer - this is exactly what I was looking for!