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There are times when servers are physically removed from your farm environment before they are removed from the SharePoint farm instance.  When this happens, SharePoint can have orphaned data remaining in its database making it impossible to remove the server through Central Administration without some manual intervention.

Note:  It is important to remove these orphaned servers as SharePoint will attempt to deploy sites (if configured as a Web Application Server) and other packages (such as contents of a solution package) to the orphaned server and permanently error out making the administration of your farm more difficult as you continue to add functionality.

When you attempt to remove the orphaned server, you will receive an error similar to the following:

Remove failed: An object in the SharePoint administrative framework depends on other objects which do not exist. Ensure that all of the objects dependencies are created and retry this operation.

(Remove failed: Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80000007):

The conflict occurred in database “SharePoint_Config”, table “dbo.Objects”, column ‘ParentId’. An object in the SharePoint administrative framework depends on other objects which do not exist.

This error is usually due to an orphaned reference to the Single Sign-On Service.  To fix this problem, you can do the following:

Note: This requires manual editing of the SharePoint configuration database.  Any manual changes made to this database that result in an error will NOT be supported by Microsoft.

select * from objects where Name like '%<SERVER NAME>%'

Use the output of that statement to obtain the ID (GUID) of the orphaned server.

select * from dependencies where objectid = '<GUID>'

The row returned will allow you to see the relationship (Object –> Dependency) that is preventing the removal of the orphaned server. It is most likely that if you look up the Dependent ID in the Objects table, you will see that it is a reference to the “SSOSRV” service (Single Sign-On Service).

After making sure you have found the correct entry, delete the item from the Dependencies table.

delete from dependencies where objectid = '<GUID>'

At this point, you will be able to remove your orphaned server from your farm (no IISRESET required).