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Remove WFE Role from a Farm

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Servers in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm can be allocated to many different roles, like Apps, Front End, Central admin

I will discuss here how to disable and enable Web Front End Role (WFE)

Below are the steps for removing a server from the Web Front End Role (WFE). Please note these steps assume that you have removed the server from your load balancer and that all services have been migrated to other servers.

The normal thing is to use central admin and start or stop the SharePoint foundation web application service through central admin from services in the server link but sometimes this doesn't work properly and the process keeps trying to stop or start

The other way is use stsadm although it is old for SharePoint 2013 but it is effective

To disable the WFE
From command prompt of this server open it as admin and navigate to the SharePoint working folder c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN and then  execute this command

stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype spwebservice

Give it time depending on the available the web applications

To enable the WFE on a server from command prompt open it as admin and navigate to the SharePoint working folder c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN and then execute this command

stsadm -o provisionservice -action start-servicetype spwebservice
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In Environment where load Balancer exists then need to handle the addition and removing on Virtual IP Pool
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It is also worth mentioning that deciding the role of the server varies per business need if it will be front end, app or back end.
In 2013 there is new topology which is called streamlined topology that consists of Front ends, Batch Process Servers, Back end DB

Plan service deployment in SharePoint 2013

Another note that I was facing issue while removing the front end role so the solutions I found where referring to using stsadm but there is PowerShell command to do so but didn't test it in case where the service didn't respond to stop command from the console

Stop-SPServiceInstance -Identity <ServiceGUID>

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