Removal of WFE from a SharePoint Farm and its impact on deployed solutions

Question

I have a production farm with 2 WFE and 1 Central Admin and 1 Database Server. I have a requirement where I need to remove the WFE from the farm.

I'm clear on the process on how to go about removing one of the WFE. All I wanted to know was what impact does it have on the custom deployed solutions that are present in all the servers in the farm.

I mean if I remove one of the WFE from the farm , what will happen to the solutions that are present in the WFE server. Will it cause any problems for the solutions deployed in other servers in the farm ? Please help me on this.

Answer 1

I have done this before, and never had any trouble, solutions are deployed to the file system of the servers (in case of farm solutions), there's no registration or something like that as to what servers it's deployed on. When you for instance redeploy a solution, SharePoint'll retract from the servers still in the farm (in a loop probably), and won't try to reach the removed server.

Answer 2

WFE servers are there to cater all your requests and are exact replica of each other. If you remove one, your system will be slow in processing requests but it won't hamper the functionality.