Removal of Active Directory

Question

We are considering removing Active Directory from our environment (mainly due to the fact that all our servers are now cloud hosted), and I am trying to come up with a proposal/plan of attack from the SQL side.
Has anyone done this before? I.E had SQL servers on a domain, then removed them from a domain? I'm basically looking for "Best Practice" on how to achieve this.
We also have some replication running from one server to another (1 publisher, 1 subscriber) - what would be the impact on this? My understanding is that it needs to run using a Windows account, so do I simply create the same user account on both servers
(same username/password etc.)?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Taylor,
According to my knowledge, if you remove SQL Server from a domain, you need to note the following things.
1. Change SQL Server Services to use local windows accounts or one of the built-in accounts if they originally run under domain accounts.
2. Job owners, linked server accounts, proxy accounts need to be changed if they are referencing the domain name.
3. If replication , log shipping or database mirroring is in use, it need to be dropped and reconfigured. As your post, for replication, create a local windows account on both the Publisher and Subscriber that has the same username and password. Use this account
for the replication agent process account and ensure the account has the permissions required in
Replication Agent Security Model.
Thanks,
Lydia Zhang