OpsMgr 2007: How to configure a gateway to communicate with a different management server without moving agents

TipHere’s a neat piece of documentation I came across today that was written by one of our top Support Escalation Engineers, Ganesh Babu gnana Sundaram.  If you ever need to reconfigure a Gateway server to communicate with a different Management server then this one’s for you:

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You may find yourself in a situation where a Gateway server is configured to communicate with the Root
Management server, or some other Management server, but due to reasons such as load you may need to configure it to communicate with a different management server.

To do this, first run the following commands from a Command Shell on the Root Management server (or whichever server the Gateway is correctly configured to communicate with):

$MS = Get-Managementserver | where {$_.Name -eq ‘<Name_of_Management_server>’}
$GW = Get-Managementserver | where {$_.Name -eq ‘<Name_of_Gateway_server>’}
Set-Managementserver -GatewayManagementserver:$GW -PrimaryManagementServer:$MS

After running the above command, complete the following on the Gateway server:

1.Open the Registry editor on the Gateway server and navigate to this location:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Server Management group\<name>\Parent Health Services\0

Change the following Registry keys to point to the New management server.

AuthenticationName
NetworkName

2.Stop the Healthservice on the Gateway server and Rename the “Health Service State” folder under %Program Files%\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ on the Gateway server to “Health Service State Old” and then start the Healthservice. After few minutes , the Gateway server will resume communication with the New management server.

Note: You will see an event ID 20020 logged on the New Management server when the gateway starts communicating with it.

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Thanks Ganesh!

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer