We have a SCCM environment consisting of the following Primary Parent Site Server - SQL 2005, DP, MP, RP Primary Child Site Server for Domain A - SQL 2005, DP, MP, RP, USMP Primary Child Site Server for Domain B - SQL 2005, DP, MP, RP, USMP Secondary Site Server for each site - DP, USMP We are planning on enabling PXE service points on all secondary site servers for ZTI OSD. My question is on which server should we be creating the required collections, boot images, OS images, TS', etc. Would it be best to implement the required changes on the Parent Site Server or on each of the Child Site Servers? Thanks

Depends on what the requirements are (think about things like management). The biggest thing to keep in mind is that all these things (Collections, Packages, etc) are replicated downward through the hierarchy.My Blog: http://www.petervanderwoude.nl/ Follow me on twitter: pvanderwoude

As Peter said keep in mind that content does replicate between different sites. Also it replicates downward and also upward. and horizontally. All what you need to make sure happens for your clients to successfully execute is the content being available in an accessable DP for the running clients. Thanks, Mahmoud, ConfigMgr test team at Microsoft

It also depends on the IT staff availability. If you have IT staff at Child sites, then its better to have collections/boot images created at Child site. Also by creating collections/boot images locally, you conserve bandwidth (atleast bandwidth needed for copying them to other DPs). Are the boot images/OS images going to stay the same for all the sites?

If this is all for the same business entity I would do the work at the Primary Parent Site Server and allow the packages, task sequences, driver packs, etc. flow down the hierarchy. This allows you to create it once and distribute it out in the environment. From there, you can determine where to create the collections. You could create them at the top level or manage them individually at the Child Primary sites. The benefit of creating collections at the Primary Child level is that clients reporting to those sites will respond to requests faster. You will not have the replication delay of adding clients to a collection at the Parent Primary site and waiting for it to replicate to the Child Primary. As others have stated, there are several ways to do this. It depends on what fits your environment and management structure the best.

Thanks for all the replies guys. Regarding onsite IT staff, very little of our sites have an onsite presence so we will be relying on SCCM to distribute the packages over the WAN. If this proves to be an issue we have a contingency plan to ship the media to each site and have someone attend site to upload the required files. As for replication of the data from parent to child sites, ideally we would like to adopt this approach to save on implementation times. So if we were to create the collections, import drivers, create driver and app packages along with the OS image on the parent site, would we have to distribute this then to the child sites and secondary sites respectively - or is the replication to the child sites automated? We have one support team managing the entire SCCM infrastructure, the reason for the two child sites is we are in the middle of a forest migration so we have two forests side by side. The parent and child site servers are in the same datacentre so i dont envisage much of a delay in client reporting? Thanks

If you have the disk space keep copies local for distribution... Image deployments are not small and over a WAN could take serious time and bandwidth causing your network admin to want to hurt you.