Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager High availability and performance tuning

Table of Contents

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager High availability and performance tuning

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Planning for High Availability with Configuration Manager

Planning

Networking

Hardware

Database server

Virtualization hosts

Other Configuration Manager roles

Backup

Other components

Database planning

Central Administration site

Primary sites

Secondary sites

Management point

Distribution point

Software Update point

Fallback Status point

Application Catalog Website point & Web Service point

Reporting Services point

Network flow

New in Service Pack 1

Summary

2. Configuring Roles for High Availability

Site Server

Endpoint Protection

Asset Intelligence Synchronization Point

Fallback Status Point

Out of Band Service Point

Secondary sites

Windows Intune Connector

Management Point

Distribution point

PXE distribution point

Cloud-based distribution point

Pull-based distribution point

Rate limiting options

Application Catalog Website point

Application Catalog Web Service point

Reporting Services point

State Migration point

System Health Validator point

SMS Provider

Software Update point

Client

Sample site designs

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

Scenario 4

Scenario 5

Scenario 6

Monitoring

Summary

3. Deploy Highly Available Backend Services

Active Directory

DNS

SQL Server

DHCP

Active Directory Certificate Services

Summary

4. Backup and Recovery

Backing up the site server

Backing up content

Backing up user state migration data

Backing up custom reports

Backing up a cloud-based distribution point

Backing up the Certification Authority

Restoring a site server

Restoring a secondary site server

Summary

5. Performance Tuning

Servers

Virtualizing hosts and physical servers

Identifying bottlenecks

Virtualization hosts

IIS

A SQL server

OS-deployment

Endpoint Protection

The Configuration Manager site

Reporting services

Summary

Index

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager High availability and performance tuning

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager High availability and performance tuning

Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: November 2013

Production Reference: 1191113

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78217-676-3

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Cover Image by Ravaji Babu (<[email protected]>)

Credits

Author

Marius Sandbu

Reviewers

Dragos Madarasan

Marius A. Skovli

Acquisition Editor

Antony Lowe

Commissioning Editor

Manasi Pandire

Technical Editors

Pragnesh Bilimoria

Iram Malik

Veena Pagare

Project Coordinator

Aboli Ambardekar

Proofreader

Mario Cecere

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Graphics

Yuvraj Mannari

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Marius Sandbu is a Consultant, Advisor, and Trainer working at the VAD (Value Added Distributor) Commaxx in Norway. He has worked with Microsoft technology for over 8 years and has recently been awarded with a MVP title from Microsoft because of his high dedication to the Microsoft community. He is also a board member of the local Microsoft technology user group and spoken at many public events at both Microsoft and other events.

Marius has always had a high interest in technology, over the past few years he has taken over 20 certifications on different areas and technology, and also had a role within Microsoft as a V-TSP. He is also a certified Microsoft trainer and has held different courses, within System Center and Windows Server.

As an experiment to improve his learning skills, he started blogging in 2012 and now has over 2000 visitors to date. He also contributes to Born To Learn which is a Microsoft community website for training and certification.

I thank my lovely other half, Silje, for supporting and having patience with me, this is what made the book possible! Wouldn't be possible without you!

I also thank the people at Packt Publishing for a clean and efficient process with the book writing. It was a good experience and I've learned a lot during the process.

About the Reviewers

Dragos Madarasan is a Support Engineer for one of the fastest growing companies in Eastern Europe. After previous stints as a freelance IT Consultant and working for a Fortune 500 company, he now enjoys tackling complex scenarios and using his knowledge to bridge the space between IT and business needs.

Dragos publishes interesting cases on his personal blog and whenever time permits enjoys taking part in the ITSpark community as a Technical Writer and Speaker.

When not in front of a laptop, Dragos enjoys running and reading books on his Kindle.

Marius A. Skovli is a senior systems engineer at the consultant company Eniotec. It is a Microsoft partner specializing in delivering System Center and Windows Server solutions. He has worked with System Management since Microsoft System Management Server (SMS) 2003 and has focused on SMS and the latest version, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), ever since. Marius has extensive experience and knowledge of enterprise environments with high security demands, both private and governmental.

In addition to vast experience with SMS and SCCM solutions, he is also a certified MCP (SMS 2003), MCTS (SCCM 2007 / SCCM 2012), MCITP (enterprise administrator), and MCSE (private cloud).

Marius is the co-founder of Eniotec. His role is to help customers design, implement, and maintain their Configuration Manager environments. He also speaks at events and contributes on forums. In his spare time, he blogs and tweets about Microsoft System Center.

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Preface

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager is a book that covers all of the aspects from planning to deploying a redundant Configuration Manager environment.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Planning for High Availability with Configuration Manager, covers what you need to plan for when you want to set up High Availability for your site. For instance, it shows how to plan a layout for SQL server, what kind of networking technology to use, and so on.

Chapter 2, Configuring Roles for High Availability, covers how you can deploy the different Configuration Manager roles that are highly available. For instance, it shows how we can deploy the application catalog service redundantly and the different forms of distribution points, and how they can affect the performance on our site.

Chapter 3, Deploy Highly Available Backend Services, covers how you can deploy backend services, such as DNS and AD that are highly available and how they operate together. It will also cover services such as SQL and using a redundant PKI solution.

Chapter 4, Backup and Recovery, covers what you need to take into account and how you can back up and restore a Configuration Manager environment. It also covers how the content store is built up and what we can use to back it up.

Chapter 5, Performance Tuning, covers various performance tuning tips such as OS deployment, virtualized environments, and SQL deployments. This chapter will also go into different OS tuning tips such as identifying bottlenecks using different tools.

What you need for this book

In order to try out the subjects covered