In March round 2 of the Configuration Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program was kicked off. It was announced that during this round the topics of the earlier round would be recycled but based on the Beta 2 release of ConfigMgr 2012. I intend to also participate in this round and share key takeaways for each of the CEP sessions.
Two days ago the session on ConfigMgr Hierarchy was scheduled. Presenter for this session was D.C. Tardy, senior Program Manager. Below you can find some key takeways:
Infrastructure Promises
- Modernized Architecture
- Minimizing infrastructure requirements for remote locations
- Consolidating infrastructure for primary sites
- Improvements related to scalability and data latency
- Being Trustworthy
- Interactions with SQL DBA are consistent with ConfigMgr 2007
- ConfigMgr Admin can monitor and troubleshoot replication approach independently
Hierarchy Simplification
- Clients are managed through primary sites, not the CAS
- CAS is needed when:
- There is more then one primary site in a hierarchy
- There is a requirement to offload reporting and administration from the primary site
- Add primary sites for:
- Scaling (100.000+ clients)
- Reduce impact of site failure
- Local point of connectivity for administration
- Political reasons
- Content Regulation
- Use secondary sites for:
- Managing upward going WAN traffic
- Tiered content rooting for deep topologies
- Location without local administrators
- Add local DP’s for:
- Situations where BITS is not sufficient for controlling WAN traffic
- OSD Multicasting
- App-V Streaming
Distribution Points
- New for DP’s:
- One DP type
- Can be hosted on client and server OS’s
- Throttling and scheduling features
- PXE / Multicast capabilities
- Drive specification for content storage
- Requires IIS feature
Content Prestaging
- New functionality in ConfigMgr 2012
- One feature that can preload on site server or DP
- Supports all package types
- Content library and package share
- Registers package availability with the site server
- Compression
- Conflict detection to ensure latest package versions are used
Forest Discovery & Boundaries
- Forest Discovery
- Discovery at the site server forest level and any trusted forests
- Ability to manually add forests that are not trusted (eg DMZ scenarios)
- Returns the domains, sites and IP Subnets
- Supports the creation of boundaries (can be automated)
- Boundaries
- Same types are in ConfigMgr 2007
- Simplified management
- Automatic creation as part of forest discovery
- Split between client assignment and content lookuo
- Boundary groups for organizing boundaries in logical containers
- Boundary groups are the primary object for client assignment and content lookup – not the boundaries!
- Auto-create boundary groups when migrating from ConfigMgr 2007
SQL Server
- One site per SQL instance
- All database communication is encrypted
- TCP/IP port for service broker
Client Settings
- Approach change
- Essential to stop use primary sites for different client settings
- Default client settings for the entiry hierarchy and custom settings assigned to collections
- Custom settings overrule default settings. Priority based.
Role Based Administration
- Remove clutter: goal is to only display what is relevant to the current user
- Security roles determine what objects a user can see and what he can do with them
- Security scope: what instances can I see and interact with
- Collections: which resource can I interact with
Collection limiting
- Assigning a collection to an administrator automatically assigns all limited collections
- Product ships with only 2 read only root collections
- Every collection is limited by another
- All Systems
- All Users & User Groups
