How to Remove a Ghost Server in Web Farm After Migrating a Reporting Services Installation?

Question

How to Remove a Ghost Server in Web Farm After Migrating a Reporting Services Installation?

Just followed the steps in https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143724.aspx to migrate a Reporting Services installation onto a new server (from and to SQL 2012 Standard Edition) But when I'm ready to verify my deployment using the Report Manager web interface I get the error:

The feature: "Scale-out deployment" is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services. (rsOperationNotSupported)

Indeed when I go back to the Reporting Services Configuration manager, under Scale-out Deployment I have 2 servers, the one on the local server (new machine) and a reference to the old Server that has a different name. Problem is when I try to remove it tells me the task has failed:

Microsoft.ReportingServices.WmiProvider.WMIProviderException: Unable to connect to the Report Server . ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x800706BA): The RPC server is unavailable

I can understand why it's unavailable as it is on a different network all together. so my question is, how can I get rid of it so everything can finally work?

sql-server

reporting-services

migration

asked on Stack Overflow Sep 4, 2015 by

Johann

2 Answers

Found it. The way to remove the ghost server is to connect to the ReportServer database, and remove the old server from the dbo.Keys table. After a restart of Reporting Services, the old server isn't in the list anymore.

answered on Stack Overflow Sep 7, 2015 by

Johann

USE ReportServer
go
select * from keys

--for safety added to the delete ghost machine if no recent executions in last 30 days.

delete from keys 
where MachineName = 'YourGhostServer' --replace with your old server name, if multiple run one by one.
and MachineName not in (select substring(InstanceName,0,(charindex('\',InstanceName,0))) 
                          from ExecutionLog 
                         where timestart>getdate()-30 
                         group by InstanceName)

CAREFUL, run the first part only with the select, analyze the output then copy the specific machine name value (old server name) you wish to delete into the where clause of the delete statement, replacing YourGhostServer verbiage.

Note, the Keys table may have legitimate machines that are network reachable and online. You can verify this by simply pinging them or checking if they run the SSRS Service, don't just simply delete from the table a server that's actually online, instead use the Report Server Manager to remove a Server that's online.

Deleting from the Keys table should only be done if the old machine is truly unreachable or has been decommissioned. At least, that's what I would do in my case. :)

answered on Stack Overflow Sep 15, 2017 by

Hiram • edited Sep 25, 2017 by

Hiram

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