SCCM 2012 Design Considerations

SCCM 2012 Design Considerations

Central Administration Site

• A central administration site can support up to 25 child primary sites
• When you use SQL Server Enterprise or Datacenter for the site database at the central administration site, the shared database and hierarchy supports up to 400,000 clients
• In most cases a CAS is not required. You only need a CAS if:
• you REQUIRE more than one Primary Site
• you have over 100,000 clients

Primary Site

• A stand-alone primary site always supports up to 100,000 clients
• Each primary site management point can support up to 25,000 computer clients. To support 100,000 clients you must have at least four management points. Each primary site can support up to 10 management points
• Each primary site can support up to 250 secondary sites

Primary Site Server (local or remote SQL)

 

• Microsoft support both scenarios and do not care where SQL is installed. However most ConfigMgr consultants will tell you to install SQL locally. You have more control and your solution will be less problematic.
• Also the ConfigMgr Primary Site Server computer account must be local administrator and Sysadmin for the SQL instance. This is a hard sell for most DBAs in a shared SQL environment.

 

Secondary Site

• The number of secondary sites per primary site is based on continuously connected and reliable wide area network (WAN) connections. For locations that have fewer than 500 clients, consider a distribution point instead of a secondary site
• Each secondary site supports a single management point that must be installed on the secondary site server.
• Maximum number of clients in 5,000

Distribution Point

• Individually, each primary site supports up to 250 distribution points and each distribution point can support up to 4,000 clients.
• Individually, each secondary site supports up to 250 distribution points and each distribution point can support up to the same number of clients as supported by the hardware configuration of the secondary site server, up to no more than 4,000 clients.
• Each primary site supports a combined total of up to 5,000 distribution points. This total includes all the distribution points at the primary site and all distribution points that belong to the primary site’s child secondary sites.
• Each distribution point supports a combined total of up to 10,000 packages and applications.

Boundaries

Best practice is to use IP Ranges

High Availability

• ConfigMgr is not a real-time service like Exchange or SharePoint. It has not been designed to be "highly available" (even though you can introduce a certain amount of redundancy by deploying additional management points). It is more useful that you implement a backup strategy (with regular test restores) so that you can recover a failed site in an acceptable time-frame.
• Note that ConfigMgr 2012 supports full recovery via SQL backup alone.