2012 R2 Hierarchy Design questions...

Hey all,

I'm getting the opportunity to start again with SCCM 2012 R2 and would like to get the design spot on. Currently we have a CAS and a couple of Primaries (largely political reasoning) but I would like to avoid the number of Primaries that we currently have.

The company is dispersed geographically and the CM deployment will manage circa 5,000 clients.

Our network is a dual star layout with offices in North America (Canada and US) around 1,000 clients - the Canadian user base is around 800 of these with a total of 53 offices and remote locations (some of the remote locations are very remote and have radio links to larger sites).

In Europe we're split across the UK, Netherlands and Norway where the remaining 4,000 ish are split across five main sites all with remote locations to support also (some at the end of satellite connections).

Canada and UK are the two hub data centres with dual 50 Mbps links between them.

If a single Primary is stood up in the UK, how will the experience be for the North American operations? All sites package their own apps which are stored locally on file servers. If Canadian admins package apps which point locally, will they have to replicate back to the Primary's ContentLib before heading back out to a Secondary Site or DP in their region? They currently have over 300 apps packaged which we don't need sitting around on infrastructure that's in the UK.

Is the best approach to go with a single Primary, some Secondarys + DP's or would a CAS, two Primaries with the odd Secondary Site + DP's provide a better experience?

All help, thoughts and comments welcomed.

Regards,

Neil

May 25th, 2015 8:44am

CAS is not recommended in SCCM 2012 as site is no longer administrative boundary. Please go with single primary

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May 25th, 2015 9:03am

Hello Prashant,

Many thanks for your reply, we are leaning towards the;

approach to go with a single Primary, some Secondarys + DP's

However to completely rule out the CAS are you able to provide any insight / guidance with regards to the question on how CM manages the application data;

If a single Primary is stood up in the UK, how will the experience be for the North American operations? All sites package their own apps which are stored locally on file servers. If Canadian admins package apps which point locally, will they have to replicate back to the Primary's ContentLib before heading back out to a Secondary Site or DP in their region? They currently have over 300 apps packaged which we don't need sitting around on infrastructure that's in the UK.

We really want to make sure that we are not putting any unnecessary traffic across the transatlantic links and avoid any delays in the application deployment process.

Thanks

May 25th, 2015 10:21am

An application (or package) would have to cross the wire twice, but I would prefer that before setting up a CAS.
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May 25th, 2015 10:37am

I concur with Torsten. Yes, there is certainly some bandwidth wastage here, which can partially be avoided by using a remote desktop session host near the primary where all admins perform their admin work including package/application creation. The overhead, latency, and complexity involved with a CAS and multiple primaries is simply not worth avoiding a little bit of bandwidth use in most cases IMO. There is no perfect answer for this scenario though.
May 25th, 2015 11:55am

Yes, as Thorsten specified, If Canadian admins packages apps which points locally, they will first be added to Primary ConntentLib before you distribute it to Secondary/DP in their region.

As they have a 50 M connection, you should get these apps copied over the weekend or some other agreed time as suitable to UK Primary and maintain your apps centrally for a better administrative approach going forward.

Also as recommended by Jason, using a remote desktop session host near the primary for administration is the way to go for better admin experience.

-RG

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May 25th, 2015 4:24pm

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