We recently had one of our clients need to retire one of the RDS servers from their farm and wanted to know to correct process for decommissioning.
While it is not difficult, we have had clients just power down an RDS server and delete it. This is bad.
PHASE 1 – Scream Test
- Launch Server Manager, wait for it to refresh
- Go to Remote Desktop Services (left menu)
- Select the RDS Collection
- In the HOST SERVERS section, select the server you decomm
- Right-click the server and select
Do not allow new connections
Let it sit for at least a week.
PHASE 2 – RDS Decommission
After you’re confident you really don’t need that server, get rid of it:
- Remove the server from Server Manager: Open Server Manager, go to the Remote Desktop Services section, and remove the server from the farm
- Uninstall RDS roles: On the RDS server being decommissioned, uninstall the Remote Desktop Services roles (RD Session Host, RD Connection Broker, etc.)
- Remove from Active Directory: If you want to remove the server from the domain, you can join it to a workgroup and then power it off
If you have removed an RDS server without the steps above, you will need to remove it from Active Directory (i.e. find the machine in ADUC, right click and DELETE it) and clean up the RDS Farm meta data:
- Remove server metadata: Use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to the RDS Connection Broker database and delete the server entries from the relevant tables (e.g., rds.Server and rds.RoleRdsh)
For more details see this short article with screenshots.
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