SCCM 2. 01. 2 Building the Servers Digital Nervous System Making Incredible Software, Incredibly Simple. SCCM 2. 01. 2 Building the Servers. May 2. 01. 2 1. In this post I am going to cut back on screen shoots, and just focus on the main points, if you need deep dives, use the comments and ill try to help, and of course I can strongly recommend the top class guides by fellow MVP Niall Brady which are very technical with tons of great hints and tips. We will hit the bullets that offer the road map to what I am installing on the servers, and why. At the end of this post we should have the basics all in place across the globe to start getting some work done and focusing on the objective. Server Prep. Before I get on the the Configuration Manager installations, this is a little house keeping which needs to be taken care of first, nothing to technical. This should be installed on the 3 servers, just for kicks, and to save us some headaches later Also, lets just make sure we are all on the same page. We have already a working Active Directory, this we prepared in the last post. This Forest also has a working Enterprise Certificate Authority which is issuing both computer and user certificates to the domain automatically. This is the hit list Note if you install. NET 4. 0 after IIS you will need to register and enable it Valid Certificates from the Enterprise CA. NET 3. 5. NET 4. 0. Sccm Software Distribution Tool' title='Sccm Software Distribution Tool' />Background Intelligent Transfer Services BITSRemote Differential Compression. IIS. Common HTTP Features. Static Content. Default Document. Directory Browsing. HTTP Errors. HTTP Redirection. SCCM Software Update PART 1 Introduction to SCCM and WSUS SCCM Software Update PART 2 Software Update Point configuration SCCM Software Update PART 3. Here at 2Pint we produce new ideas and vision around Peer Caching and Downloading technologies such as Microsoft BranchCache, BITS and others. Application Development. ASP. NET. NET Extensibility. ASPISAPI Extensions. ISAPI Filters. Health and Diagnostics. HTTP Logging. Logging Tools. Request Monitor. Tracing. Security. Basic Authentication. One of most important and critically used feature in configuration manager 2012 is Software updates. It is always challenging and import task for any sccm. Thanks. Thats a great tip. I made the suggested changes and noticed in the Sender Analyser great tool too after a short while that the number of. SCCM 2012 Building the Servers 16 min read. In this post I am going to cut back on screen shoots, and just focus on the main points, if you need deep. Windows Authentication. URL Authorization. Request Filtering. IP and Domain Restrictions. Performance. Static Content Compression. Management Tools. IIS Management Console. IIS Management Scripts and Tools. Management Services. IIS 6 Management Compatibility. IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility. IIS 6 WMI Compatibility. IIS 6 Scripting. IIS Management Console. Notice that I do not have SQL listed above, thats because i have this already in place in my Enterprise. However, we need to make sure some stuff is up to specification here also, as all good Microsoft installations have there expectations. Valid Certificate from the Enterprise CASQL is installing in a Highly Available configuration, for example a Cluster. We have at least 2 instances on this SQL Environment. SQL Instances are Configured to use STATIC TCP ports multiple instances default to Dynamic so be sure not to get stuck hereSQL is running SQL 2. R2 SP1 with CU 6. SQL Collation is set to SQLLatin. GeneralCP1CIAS on both Instances. Add the Computer account of the Servers we will be deploying the Central Site, and Primary site systems on SVR SC CM0. SVC SC CM0. 2 to the computers Local Administrative group. In addition, I have another SQL Server which is hosting the SQL Reporting Services we will configure this a little later. Valid Certificates from the Enterprise CASQL Reporting Services Default Configuration. SQL 2. 00. 8 R2 SP1 with CU 6. Add the Computer account of the Servers we will be deploying the Central Site, and Primary site systems on SVR SC CM0. SVC SC CM0. 2 to the computers Local Administrative group. Now, last point of action. That should be itCentral Site. The Central Command and Control site, and to be honest a pretty unchallenging installation. This installation is carried out on my first purpose server. The main installation highlights included. On the Updated prerequisite Components age, choosing the option Download and use the latest updated. Provide a path on the network, so that we can use these components again for the next server, and prevent the requirement to download again. On the Server Language Selection choose the languages you wish to use. I just opted to plain old English Only, as a policy we try to keep the global deployments in a single language which all the respective support team understand. On the Client Language Selection page, again choose the languages of choice. Keeping it simple, English again is the choice here. On the Site and Installation Settings page, we need to offer a little details. For the Site code I used CM0 which i will consider as Configuration Management Site 0. The site name was easy Production SCCM Central Site. The Installation Folder I opted to keep the default. And keep the option enabled for Install the Configuration Manager Console. On the Database Information page, I now point to the second SQL Instance which will be used for this site. In the Server Name text field, I entered the cluster node name of the SQL Instance, e. SQL1. NODE0. domain. In the Instance Name text field, I then supplied the instance name for this cluster node e. SQL1. NODE0. INSTANCEIn the Database Name text field, I set the name to SCCMCM0 to help identify the purpose and site this database refers to. In the SSB Port, I made no changes. On the SMS Provide Settings page. In the FQDN of the server where the SMS Provider is to be installed text field, I made no changes, and accepted this server as suggest by the wizard. On the CEIP page, being a good tester, i opted in. On the Settings Summary page I ran a quick check to see if all looked correct, and let it rip. Ok, cool that is it, let it work and we can start looking at next server. Primary Site. Now for the heart of the environment, This server will host the main and only Primary site which I will be implementing into the production environment. I will of course be adding many more site servers to this site as we get the system working, but one step at a time. This installation is ready to go on the second purpose server we prepared, and will report up the central site. Before you kick off here, we have one more pre requisite to install, and thats the Admin Console for WSUS. Windows Roles and Features is a pain here as it does not offer the option to install just the Administrative console, so you need to go out and grab the WSUS 3. Microsoft Site this one offers you the option for Console only or the full install. Strings Let It Rain more. Encase you forgot already, you want the Console only The main installation highlights included but dont start this until the central site install is doneOn the Updated prerequisite Components page, choosing the option Use previously downloaded updates from the following location. Provide the network path we used in the Central Server, as i have no plan to download the same stuff again. On the Server Language Selection choose the languages you wish to use. I just opted to plain old English Only, as a policy we try to keep the global deployments in a single language which all the respective support team understand. On the Client Language Selection page, again choose the languages of choice. Keeping it simple, English again is the choice here. On the Site and Installation Settings page, we need to offer a little details. For the Site code I used CM1 which i will consider as Configuration Management Site 1. The site name was easy Production SCCM Primary Site. The Installation Folder I opted to keep the default. And keep the option enabled for Install the Configuration Manager Console. On the Primary Site Installation page, I now choose Join the primary site to and existing hierarchy. Controlling concurrent package distribution in SCCMOctober 1. I normally only write blog posts about subjects that arent covered particuarly well on the web or that seem, on the whole, to be misunderstood and I think this area is certainly one of them. Recently we had some issues on one of our primary SCCM site servers, that has around 7. Of the many different packages that were waiting to be sent, one package was over 1. GB in size and two were nearly 4. GB. As you can imagine sending this much data, to 7. Now obviously if we had left the sending capacity as default it would have eventually cleared the backlog, once the large packages had finally sent, but it was starting to affect operations as software waiting to go live couldnt, due to waiting for distribution. So we decided to crank up sending capacity. Now Ive always assumed the way to do this was from Site Settings Component Configuration Software Distribution Distribution Point tab and there is the Concurrent distribution settings options, which allow you to change Maximum number of packages and Maximum threads per package. What I have done in the past is put the Maximum number of packages to 7 which is the maximum and set Maximum threads per package to 1. Now at this point I just assumed the amount it sent would increase and think nothing else of it but this time I wanted to monitor what was being sent and to what secondary sites. To do this I used a small application that a friend of mine developed called Sender Analyser http www. Html Form File Upload Php more. Its much easier than trying to read the sender. I promise you The results of the Sender Analyser showed the following and the sender. Java Serialized Object Http Post more. Both show that the Primary server was only sending 5 out of a maximum of 5 packages to the secondary sites at any one time, even though I set both Concurrent distribution settings values to 7 and 1. This started me thinking whether these settings Id changed had anything to do with site to site distribution of packages at all but were actually settings designed to control the distribution of packages to local or remote DPs of its own site only. To check I decided to have a look at the distmgr. I noticed was this So the distmgr. I had set theMaximum number of packages value to. To test my theory I changed the same setting to 6 and the distmgr. Used 0 out of 6 allowed exactly like I thought it would. So what does this mean Well the SMSDISTRIBUTIONMANAGER component is mainly used to uncompress the compressed package files that are sent to it from its parent site into proper package format that can be downloaded by the clients. If the primary or secondary site has multiple servers setup as DPs in its own site, either locally or remote, this is the component in charge of copying these package files from the site server to the DP. The Concurrent distribution settings are the way you control how many packages and how many threads Im not sure if threads apply to concurrent number of servers or processor threads it can handle at one time. What seems clear to me is that it doesnt affect the way that packages are sent from a parent site to a child site. So, you may be asking, how do you increase the amount of concurrent packages a parent site can send to its child sites from the, apparent, default of 5 Simple. All you need to do is change the properties for your Sender. By going to Site Settings Senders Standard Sender Advanced tab. Here is the Maximum concurrent sendings options, which allow you to change the maximum number of objects that can be sent to All sites or Per site As you will see the default for All sites is 5 and in our previous sender. Coincidence No I didnt think so either, so I started increasing the All sites value slowly and seeing if it matched what the sender. The sender. log showed this This quite clearly showed that the values in the Maximum concurrent sendings setting and the sender. Sender Analyser. The sender was now able to send nearly 5. I eventually settled on All sites to 2. Per site to 2. 0 but the all sites capacity rarely got above 1. I guess there is something else causing the bottleneck, still that was plenty enough. Please note that I was able to use these high values due to the spec of my server, my LAN and WAN capacities, DONT ASSUME YOU CAN USE THE SAME. I strongly recommend speaking to your network team first and slowly raising the values until you are happy. So there we have it, if you are looking to increase the capacity to send more packages to your child sites, make sure you change the right setting Related.