Prerequisites in a Production Environment
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In this Lecture: We’re going to plan out your SCCM Hierarchy
- We’ll describe the prerequisites for installing SCCM.
- We’ll present an overview of the Hierarchy of Sites
- At the completion of this lecture, you’ll have a basic understanding of the requirements necessary to successfully deploy SCCM in your organization.
Note: Some thoughtful planning of the following points will be necessary before we can start the installation of SCCM.
- First, we must determine our site configuration. Should you set up a stand-alone primary a secondary or a Central Administration Site. We’ll talk about the differences between those three sites in a minute.
- Second, we must evaluate the needed server hardware configuration. Like how many CPU cores do I need, or how much memory, hard disk space.
- Third, we must procure the latest compatible revisions of the software. And that means what branch level of SCCM should I run, and which SQL version is compatible.
Hierarchy of Sites
What is a site?
A site defines the scope of administrative control.
A scope controls the objects that an Admin sees in the CM console and the permissions on those objects.
Objects could be users, computers, and servers.
When you install SCCM for the first time, you create a Configuration Manager Site.
This site is either a Stand-alone primary, a Secondary Site, or a Central Administration Site.
We’ll take a look at these three sites starting with the Stand-Alone Primary Site
Describe a Stand-alone primary site.
- This site is considered stand-alone because a single primary site can support the management of all of your users and devices.
- A stand-alone primary site is suitable for smaller deployments but can be expanded at a later time.
- A Stand-alone primary site has all of the System Center Configuration Manager components installed on one site.
SCCM components are the Site System roles.
For example, the Software update point role provides software updates for SCCM clients.
Another example is the Management point role, which manages the communication between the client and the Server.
SCCM could be installed on one server, and the Site System roles could be spread across several servers.
- If you are using multiple servers, all the servers will point to the same site.
During the LAB installation of SCCM, you will be asked to specify the installation of a stand-alone primary or a Central Administration Site Server. Here we choose the Primary site as a stand-alone site.
- Here is an example of a primary site that was created for the lab. Showing the site code, which is the site SA1. This also shows that all the Site System roles were installed on one server. Don’t worry about the roles now, I will explain each role in detail in another lecture.
Benefits include:
- Supports 150,000 clients and devices
- Simplified administration. All the SCCM administration can be done from one server running SCCM.
- Simplified client site assignment and discovery of available resources and services.
- Option to expand later into a larger hierarchy.
Let’s take a look at those resource discovery methods.
Here is the tool that SCCM uses to find Computers and Users in the Hierarchy. Just right-click and enable System, User, discovery.
Here are the results after running the user and devices discovery methods from the Lab.
Reasons to use a Stand-alone Primary site
- You do not expect to manage a complex or geographically dispersed environment. Geographically dispersed could mean different time zones, different countries
- You need local management of devices and users.
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Timestamp at 5:34 mentioned the benefits of the secondary site but there’s a typo on the slide which showed a Stand-Alone Site
Thanks for pointing that out
Edgar David. We will ping 
Robert Hill to check on it.
Ricardo
Greetings Ricardo,
I sent all the links to Paul. Checking with him now.