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Sorry if this has been asked before.
I was tasked with decommissioning our exchange 2016 server (or trying to). I have removed the mailboxes, and the mail database. I went to remove Exchange via control panel and it failed on the prerequisite check, stating unsupported operating system, which is odd, OS is Server 2012 R2 with all updates. The attached image shows the errors, is there a way to resolve this and properly remove Exchange?
Removing Exchange using ADSIEDIT is not supported.
The supported method would be to bring up a new server with the same name using the recoverserver switch, then run the Add/Remove steps and remove Exchange gracefully
so build another vm with the same host name /os/exchange version, then remove it?
Then i guess once thats done I can just nuke the original?
I will give that a go tomorrow and report back, thanks to all so far.
Exactly. Shut down the existing server and install Exchange with the recoverserver switch, then remove it gracefully if you want to do this in a supported way.
I would prefer to do it in a way that cleanly removes it.
We are fully 365 so no need for exchange.
I was going to do this today but the 3rd party engineer we have has told me not to touch anything until Monday (Tomorrow). He never responded to any of my calls or emails so i came here, knowing I would get correct information.
I will mark the answers as soon as exchange is removed. But again thanks.
Is the "Remote Desktop Host Manager." role installed on that server? If so, remove it first, then see if you can remove Exchange.
Sorry for the delay in replying.
The only role this server has was exchange.
Interestingly enough, I cannot load server manager to confirm, I just get a refresh failed. I did reboot the server, still no result, i even left it for a while. There is no software on the machine, I had slowly taken it off prior to exchange removal. It did try the uninstaller again, after a reboot, same error.
What does
Get-WindowsFeature
show?
Attached is the output of Import-Module servermanager ; get-windowsfeature | where-object {$_.Installed -eq $True} | format-list DisplayName > c:\get-windowsfeatures.csv
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Hi,
Try uninstalling in CMD:
Setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /mode:Uninstall
I suspect everytime you run setup.exe it would check those prerequisites/requirements even though you are going to uninstall it, I would suggest to use ADSI.edit to remove Exchange directly: How to remove Exchange from Active Directory
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Thanks for the cmd, but that also failed. It output a log, but I did not understand most of it.
It seemed to error on the same thing, unsupported OS.
I will read the article you linked. Im not worried if the server gets nuked, I just dont want leftover bits in AD
After you remove the server from list of Exchange Trusted Subsystem, you can manually stop all Exchange related services and delete Exchange server folder.
Normally the server still works and AD is clean.
I updated another link with snapshots, it should be better.