Moving the server that hosts Central Administration

In our company for MOSS installation, we created a webfarm with three servers and Central Administration (CA) site was hosted on one of them. However, we added a fourth server later and wanted to use the fourth server to host the CA and do other management activities.

I went ahead and ran the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard on the fourth server and configured it to host the CA website using Advanced Settings. But the link to SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration link still took me to the server where CA was hosted initially. I removed the CA site from the first server but still the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration link continued to take me to the first server and the link failed as I had configured that machine not to host CA!

After a little research, I found that I needed to follow the following steps to accomplish my objective:

• First remove CA from the initial server before adding another server to host the CA site. Run the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard. Click next until you see an Advanced Settings button. Select Do not use this machine to host the web site. At this point, no server will be hosting CA!
• Now, on the server you wanted to move the CA hosting, run the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard. Click next until you see an Advanced Settings button. Select Use this machine to host the web site and finish configuring.

This did the trick.

Please note that you may want to backup the web.config file for CA on the initial server specially if you had made any changes to it for custom authentication providers etc. You should replace the web.config file on the new CA hosting server after you have configured it to host CA.