Renaming your SharePoint Virtual Machine

In my previous post entitled SharePoint Development Environment Scenarios, I posted a diagram recommending deployment using virtual machines on each developer's desktop.  The practical upshot of this is that you will need to store a central "base" VM somewhere - perhaps on a file share - and copy this to each developer's desktop whenever a new developer arrives. 

A problem you will encounter when doing this is that you will get an IP / Name conflict when you first boot the server - you now have two machines trying to access the same network resource, and they have the same name!  Clinton Cherry outlines a procedure to solve this problem here. 

The simple procedure I followed was:

1.Run the command line indicated i.e. stsadm -o setconfigdb -databaseserver "nameofdatabaseserver\instance" -farmuser "networkserviceaccount" -farmpassword "networkserviceaccountpassword" where I found that you had to remove the computer name if using a local account for the farmuser.  This is because the computer name has changed, and somewhere along the line the config wizard tries to use the old computer name.

2.Grant access to the new farmuser account on the relevant databases in SQL Server. The wizard will fail if it cannot access the databases.

The method worked well for me.  Check it out on Clinton Cherry's blog.

An update to this post was presented to me by my colleague, Joseph Neimann, who recently tried the process again.  Here it is:

"The final verdict was that inorder to effectively change a name you need to remove the domain from the user name before you can rename.

So first run

stsadm -o setconfigdb -databaseserver "Old_databaseserver\instance" -farmuser "networkserviceaccount" -farmpassword "networkserviceaccountpassword"

Then Rename server

Then Run

stsadm -o setconfigdb -databaseserver "New_databaseserver\instance" -farmuser "networkserviceaccount" -farmpassword "networkserviceaccountpassword"

Then run the wizard.

Success."