Hi All, I have been currently assigned a task to create a Staging environment for SCCM and SCOM application.We have got 3 VMs which have been added to the domain and UserID's created with Local admin rights. The SQL server 2005 have already been installed on to these servers. So it just that SCCM, SCOM and BizTalk server application\software need to be installed and then my work will start as I am part of the SCCM application Team. Since this been my first attempt of creating a staging environment need suggestions. Now I have done some research work of how to start my task and set up the SCCM/SCOM application perfectly. The task which I have marked down are: Active Directory Schema extension. Native mode vs Mixed mode. Central, Primary, Secondary, Child Primary.......etc. I would really appreciate, if someone can tell me how to move ahead from here and plan this whole exercise perfectly. Thanks, GauravJ

IMO there are way too many variable to answer this type of question. Before working on staging you need to look at Prod. You need to have a rough idea as to what you are going to do with it there and mimic in dev / staging. So how is ConfigMgr setup in prod or how will it be setup in prod? Tehn do a similar thing for dev/ staging. http://www.enhansoft.com/

Concur with Garth. Also, may be you can just start reading below blog to get more idea about setup? http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/forum-54/announcement-3-sccm-guides/Anoop C Nair - This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees, and confers no rights. |Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Garth, Firstly thank you for the response. If we talk abt the Prod, we are having a single primary site AUS that have around 50 clients. We have not yet deployed any thing to these machines. We have just approved it after the manual installation. Frankly speaking, I am new to SCCM tech and as per my understanding, we are creating this staging enviroment to test the deployment and effects of patches before it goes to the production enviromet. FYI......Our SCCM server is in KL.xyz.com whereas the primary site is Aus (aus.xyz.com) there has been trust relationship established b/w these sites so that client can be easily discovered. Now again our Staging enviroment servers are in KL.xyz.com domain. Regards, GauravThanks and Regards, Gaurav Jain

You can either set up a test environment that's completely separated from the production one (which I would suggest if you are unexperienced with ConfigMgr) or use a primary child site (but some kind of data flows up and might interfere with your production site). Testing hotfixs can also be done by using just a "test clients" collection and software updates deployment in your production site.Torsten Meringer | http://www.mssccmfaq.de