What is a safe way to reconnect a server from another farm to the network?

Question

I have VMWare image clone of our virtual Sharepoint web frontend. All the connections are the same (same farm basically), same exchange server, same sql server. I am afraid to connect this box to the network. Will this change anything on the farm? Unfortunately the sql and exchange server connections are production servers, whereas this box is a development/testing server.

This server was supposed to be a fail-over project that got trashed, and now I need to use it for testing. Will anything I change in this server reflect changes in the other server? Also, because the network is disabled I can't get to Central Admin because it says "Cannot Connect to Configuration Database".

Answer 1

Run the configuration wizard and disconnect the server from the farm.

You may be able to run NewSID and change the identity of the machine and then re-join the domain.

You certainly want to create a new farm for the test environment.

Answer 2

It's probably not a good idea to do this. The cloned machine will have the same SID as the original server. If both are on the network it will cause computer account conflict issues.