One our client decided to test a migration from physical to virtual, they have a farm comprise of 2 front-end web servers, 1 application server and 1 sql server.
The migration went well but we noticed that server have been renamed and alias thru DNS. After the migration, site was rendering well but there were many issues and error in the logs. The major issue was the search would not work. After trying to stop search services from Central Administration, we realized that because of the server being renamed this would not work. Short of rebuilding the configuration database to reference the proper server names, we found the following command
stsadm -o renameserver -oldservername <yyy> -newservername <xxx>
This command is to be used to change reference in the config database. It is critical that this comamnd is ran on every server of the farm and also executed to rename the SQL server.
We ran the command and noticed that the server name were not correct and after this command, the search would start.
Lastly, the SSP would not throw the following error
"The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation server". Clearly something was still not working. After some research on line, we found that Office Web Services web app has a self assigned SSL certificate which is generated during installation of MOSS.
The following MS article was helpful to troubleshoot and assign a new certificate
After running this, the SSP would correctly render and we were able to start a new crawl.
So be aware if you rename a server, replicate a farm for disaster recovery, you can't just alias server, it is critical to rename those using the proper procedure.