SCCM Design Steps - Explained in Detail - Part # 1

Part 2 of this Series :  http://sccmconfighelp.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/sccm-design-steps-explained-in-detail-part-2/

 

Today,  in this post we will see how to design a SCCM Environment . Using this post you may design your  SCCM design document . To create a SCCM Environment , it is very important that we have some detailed information . For the sake of simplicity , we will use a simple example here .



Let us Assume that we are being asked to design , architect and implement  a sccm ( System Center Configuration Manager 2012) environment with following specifications :

1. The Client has presence in 5 states of India .

2. Total user base is : 5000

3. Head office is in Mumbai : with a user base of : 4000

4. at the head office the number of servers to be maintained using sccm is : 100

4. Four Other offices are in : Bangalore , Kolkata , Delhi and Himachal .

5. User base at all these four locations is : 250 each .

6. There is a 4 Mbps connectivity between branches ( all of them ) .

7. The link utilization is below 50 % on an average during office hours and is 30 % off hours

8. Client wants to use all the features of SCCM ( OSD , Patch management , Software deployment etc ).

9. There is just one forest and one domain Ex : abctelecom.com

10 . Internet clients are not a part of this project

11. There are no cloud DP's .

The above information is handy enough to kick start our designing :



Now , To start with , we have to make a decision as to how many sites we require : or you may ask the following questions to yourself :

1. How Many SCCM Primary Sites do I need :  In this case since the total Client base is just 5000 .  Since with SCCM 2012 we can clearly divide work between engineers who manage Servers and clients .

2. Do we need a CAS :  NO . CAS in SCCM 2012 is only used for Centralized repository and reporting .

3. How Many Secondary sites do I need : This is a very Tricky Question and this is where a lot has changed between SCCM 2007 and SCCM 2012 . SCCM 2012 DP can be used for PXE i.e OSD , Throttling and Scheduling . So , We would only need DP's in our case as the bandwidth available is also good .

See the below blog posts for more clarity :

http://sccmconfighelp.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/primary-site-vs-secondary-site-vs-distribution-point-sccm-2012-which-one-to-choose-and-when-to-choose

http://sccmconfighelp.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/sccm-distribution-point-design-a-designers-delight/

Now , that we are sure that we need just One Primary and Distribution Points only , Am done with my first part .

So , so far our design looks like : 1 Primary stand Alone site and 4 Distribution Points at 4 different locations .

I close this post here and will take things in more details in the Part 2 of this series .

 

Part 2 of this Series :  http://sccmconfighelp.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/sccm-design-steps-explained-in-detail-part-2/