Package Population/Discovery Speed (And general help)
I'm in a bind here. I'm very, very new to SCCM and am doing my best to learn it and have gone through the book that we have, but what it doesn't cover is how I can make the computers discover faster in a way that can work on a per machine basis.Basically, we are moving from Altiris Deployment. I was on the Altiris team for this company and am now on the SCCM team, which is replacing Altiris. The issue I'm running into is that it seems that having our discovery happen every hour was taking a toll on our system and it was creating a ton of logs in the CCR.box folder. In fact, we had justa little over 300k files, when we only have about 4500 machines. After turning off the Network Discovery and deleting the files in the CCR.box and ccrretry.box folders, no entries are in the CCR.box. In the CCRRetry.box, we have about 1256. I've read some information on this, but am not sure what to make of it.I have had 4 complaints from people way more important than me and no matter how many times I explain to them that this works on a schedule and not a live environment, they don't seem satisfied. What they want me to figure out is, how can a computer immediately start populating packages after the computer comes on.The problem is that the discovery is set to run once a day, so (to my knowledge) the only way I can get the AD Discovery to run is by going to the Discovery Methods and then go to Active Directory System Discovery and tell it to run ASAP. I'm not sure how long that takes, but, at some time, the computer will show up.Here is where we run into a couple of problems:1. Someone installed the client manually, but they didn't input the domain in the DNS tab in the TCP/IP settings, so after I set these, I then try to reinstall the client from the SCCM Console. Otherwise, the packages never seem to populate.2. The computer shows in the console, but we don't seem to have a success in installing the client due to WMI issues.Now, one thing that I had learned is that, it is VERY common that WMI/UI Namespace issues happen on newly discovered machines, but soon resolve themselves, which happens here, but it takes time for that to happen.So, what I've been doing is do the AD Discovery and make it run ASAP, then when it appears, I install it and then wait. Is there a way to immediately show packages or a faster way to install the client?We have crews that work on installing software and such 24/7, and for new computers coming up in the environment, it takes a while. They are reporting this to their boss and their boss calls me every time, no matter how many times I explain that the computer has to update in SCCM Console, whichis based on AD OUs, so once the computer is in AD and meets the prerequisites, then they should be good to go, but even then, people are reporting that it's taking between 3 hours and 1 day to populate anything in the Run Advertised Programs list.
September 14th, 2009 8:20pm

Taek a look at ESD. http://www.systemcentertools.com/esd2007.htmlIt will help you with your discovery issues. http://www.enhansoft.com/
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
September 14th, 2009 9:07pm

Does this fall under the Microsoft Support? Our SCCM product falls within our Microsoft agreement for support, the problem is that I am not completely sure what I need to do to speed things up and then be "politically correct" to those who need to know why things don't work immediately. I've stressed that things run on a schedule, but that isn't good enough for some.I am reading through this right now.
September 14th, 2009 9:18pm

What about the time it takes for computers to start showing their advertised programs in the "Run Advertised Programs" field? We have many programs that are set to advertise to certain collections and when the computers show up in their collections, they seem to not pull up those advertisements in a time that is acceptable to our management.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
September 14th, 2009 11:41pm

There are many intervals involved in this scenario: - AD discovery: you mentioned that the collections are OU based, so you have to use 'AD system GROUP discovery'. 'AD system discovery' doen't add OU information to existing client records. You can tweak that schedule to an interval shorter than every 24 hours (adjust that carefully)- collection update interval: you could lower that interval depending on the number of clients and hardware specs of your siteserver- policy polling interval: the interval the client checks for new policies.All those intervals could sum up (in the worst case). Tweaking is possible, but depends heavily on your environment.
September 15th, 2009 10:03am

This is one thing we see a lot as well:Failed to instantiate UI Server {C2F23AE4-82D8-456F-A4AF-A2655D8CA726} with error 8000401aexecmgr9/15/2009 12:07:22 AM2940 (0x0B7C)Failed to instantiate UI Server 2 {E8425D59-451B-4978-A2AB-641470EB7C02} with error 8000401aexecmgr9/15/2009 12:07:22 AM2940 (0x0B7C)Failed to instantiate Updates UI Server {2D023958-73D0-4542-8AD6-9A507364F70E} with error 8000401aexecmgr9/15/2009 12:07:22 AM2940 (0x0B7C)Failed to instantiate VApp UI Server {00AAB372-0D6D-4976-B5F5-9BC7605E30BB} with error 0x8000401Aexecmgr9/15/2009 12:07:22 AM2940 (0x0B7C)I've spent a lot of time looking at this in the forums with no success for our environment. That computer sat in the same spot beginning Sept 10th and that log is for today. I'm not sure what is causing this.I'm trying to figure out how to get all of these issues corrected so that the management will be okay.So, both of you would recommend the ESD for our environment?
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
September 15th, 2009 5:05pm

Just ignore those "UI Server ..."errors.
September 15th, 2009 5:17pm

I think I found something...we went from having many, many computers to having about 240. Could a "Delete Special" cause this, and is there a way to undo it?How can I recover all of our computers?Edit:In our "All Systems" (pre-built collection when we got SCCM), we show: Total number of resources in collection : 3782Total number of clients in collection : 38 Total number of non-obsolete clients in collection : 37In our collection that should have all computers that are on our domain, we had many on there, maybe more do to some inconsistancy in AD, but, we should have had between 2000 and 3782. As it stands, we show: Total number of resources in collection : 240 Total number of clients in collection : 22Total number of non-obsolete clients in collection : 22We have a collection that shows "All Non-Client Systems" that was just a few, now it shows 3476 computers.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
September 15th, 2009 6:02pm

Very strange.............We are now showing 3770 in our main collection that has all of our domain computers in it...which is good...but nothing has the client on it. What happened?
September 15th, 2009 6:34pm

Back to topic: Would ESD make our advertisments display on a computer faster? See my previous post about the intervals ... ESD will only help with the discovery interval.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
September 16th, 2009 9:22am

Hey man, I'm not sure if its a dirty suggestion but have you at least considered User based distribution? Whether it will work greatly depends on how you are running things, but I was having those same problems (although I am in a MUCH smaller company, ~350 users across 3 sites). User based distribution doesnt care if the computer account has been populated as long as you have discovered your user accounts. You can then set your System Discoverey to once a day if you want. Not many people use this method, I just found it worked for me, maybe it could help with your situation too. -Dan
October 23rd, 2009 1:53am

Sounds like the company is adjusting to the technology.Here is what I would suggest.1. Deploy computers via SCCM or with the CM client pre-installed. This should allow clients to populate in the DB using the 'heartbeat discovery' ( you need to turn on heartbeat discovery) as soon as they hit the network.2.Start decreasing the time the CM clients poll for their policies. Lower this slowly... like 5-10mins at a time.3.If you have collections based on AD DNs, groups, users etc.. then you may want to run the AD discovery tasks more frequently. However, in order to see the desired result (collections with more computers or users) then you will also need to update the collections more frequently or after AD discovery has completed. I would set AD discovery to run twice during standard business hours.One other thing. If you deploy computers via SCCM you can install multiple packages in the 'task sequence' before they are even touched by a user. If the bosses want everything at one time you can ... install an OS, install updates, join the domain, and install software all in one task sequence.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 18th, 2009 7:54am

I got theTS to do software as part of the imaging task sequence so that we wouldn't have to worry about that, but we had it to where we would make an advertisement go to a collection and then it wouldn't get that until the hour. When we tuned that down to every 5 minutes, we have changed our complaints to none regarding the time it takes to get software on a computer. Our collections are definately based on AD groups. So, does this mean that when I have a collection and a new computer gets added to it in AD, that the collection won't show that new computer until AD Discovery runs?
November 19th, 2009 7:08pm

I had a question on the Heartbeat Discovery as well: What would be the recommended time for this and what does it do?
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 19th, 2009 10:18pm

I had a question on the Heartbeat Discovery as well: What would be the recommended time for this and what does it do? Discovery - in general - updates the object records in the CM database. The different discovery types (AD, heartbeat, etc..) create Data Discover Records, or DDRs, that in turn are used by CM in different ways to update the properties of an object.For example, the computer objects (right-click on a computer in a collection)have may properties. One of these properties is the 'System OU Name[]'. This field and many others are only updated when a DDR is generated for that object by the Active Directory System Discovery.See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632733.aspxfor an overview of discovery.We have Heartbeat enabled to ensure that active clients are not removed from the database when we remove old objects. It is set to send every 1 day.
November 19th, 2009 11:00pm

I got theTS to do software as part of the imaging task sequence so that we wouldn't have to worry about that, but we had it to where we would make an advertisement go to a collection and then it wouldn't get that until the hour. When we tuned that down to every 5 minutes, we have changed our complaints to none regarding the time it takes to get software on a computer. Our collections are definately based on AD groups. So, does this mean that when I have a collection and a new computer gets added to it in AD, that the collection won't show that new computer until AD Discovery runs? Yes. In order to update a collection that is based on AD properties AD Discovery will need to be run in order to generate new DDRs for the AD groups.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 19th, 2009 11:02pm

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb633103.aspxHeartbeat is used to keep the active clients from aging in the CM database. If a DDR is not generated for a period of time then the client is said to be inactive and then eventually removed from the database. This is good for normal maintenance.... keeping active clients updated with a current DDR.We have it set to once a day in our site.
November 20th, 2009 6:01am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics