SMS 2003: How to remove a site from the hierarchy

Updated: 7/13/2011

I have had few cases recently where my customer has reinstalled their SMS sites but prior to doing so they failed to remove all the traces from the DB and Register etc. This can cause a lot of issues with the Hierarchy later so to make this process easier and to help prevent some of these problems down the road I decided to put together a quick list of recommended steps to completely remove the SMS site information from the environment before reinstalling the site again.

Note that all optional steps are marked with the symbol: *

1. The first step is to stop any running SMS server services on the secondary site and then set those services to manual. The services should be stopped in the order below to ensure that the services do not automatically restart during the time delay between your stop and the actual removal. If your site has more than the below server services then the site may be a primary site and you should not use these steps to remove the application.

  • SMS_SITE_COMPONENT_MANAGER
  • SMS_EXECUTIVE
  • SMS_SITE_BACKUP

Most people also have the SMS Advanced Client (AC) installed on the site server. You can take this opportunity to remove this as well, or leave it installed on the server and reassign it after the site server is rebuilt and reassigned, or a different site server is brought online. This article makes the assumption that you will remove it, but all steps regarding the AC are optional.

2. Stop and mark as Disabled the SMS Agent Host service.

3. Delete the site from the hierarchy. This is best done from the Central Site (CS) instead of the immediate Parent Site (PS). The key to this step is patience - then again, if you're an SMS administrator, you're already well versed in patience.

From the Site Hierarchy tree, expand the tree until the desired site is displayed. Right-click on the site and select Delete.
This will launch the "Delete Secondary Site Wizard" (Wizard). For the most part, this is a very automated process and requires no other options from you other than choosing to "Deinstall the site" when prompted instead of just deleting the site.
Once you have completed the Wizard, the console will refresh, showing the hourglass symbol and making site settings inaccessible. This process takes a while - figure a window of 20 minutes on an unrestricted setup to a few
hours on sites where SMS traffic is restricted.

* If desired, you can monitor CS-side communications from within the logs SCHED.LOG, SITESTAT.LOG, SENDER.LOG and COMPSUMM.LOG. On the secondary site, monitor the removal activity using the SMSSETUP.LOG. This log file is used for all setup processes. This is your best indication of progression of the site removal. Look for the completion message: "SMS
Setup completed successfully!" after a long string of removal and unregistration messages. Using the SMS Trace 32 log file reader is the best in this situation.

Completion of the removal on the site server does not mean a completion of removal from the hierarchy. You should give the system additional time after this to finish processing any jobs related to this site and its removal. You can at this point refresh the hierarchy display on the CS. You should see the complete removal of the site from the tree.  In the event that the Wizard fails to work as expected or the site fails to deinstall as expected, you can start the removal on the client side by re-running setup (\SMS\bin\i386\SETUP.EXE) and choosing to remove the installation.

4. Remove all Sender objects (Addresses) to the secondary site.  Typically Sender objects are only located on the PS but if your environment has Sender objects to the site from more than one location they all all need to be removed. From the PS, find the Sender object under the Site Settings | Addresses node. Right-click on the object and select "Delete".  After a healthy time frame from the successful completion of the Wizard's removal, verify a complete removal of the site using the intrinsic PREINST
utility's DELSITE command. If properly deleted, the message "[site] is not a known site" is returned, else, the specified site is uninstalled. The PREINST utility has an extensive command line help which you should familiarize yourself with, but to delete a site from the command line, specify the command line below, where [2nd] is the site code of the secondary site and [CS] is the site code of the secondary site's immediate parent site:

..\SMS\bin\i386\00000409\PREINST.EXE /DELSITE [2nd] [CS]

5. Purge any outstanding jobs for the site using the same utility and the DELJOB code as described below. If enough time has passed, you should see a report that zero jobs were purged, else the number of jobs will be shown. It is not disastrous if jobs were purged.

..\SMS\bin\i386\00000409\PREINST.EXE /DELJOB [2nd]

Once this is completed you can consider the site fully removed and a restall, if necessary, can be performed.

Hope this helps!

Deepak Sidpura | Manageability Support Engineer