I am in the process of setting up a new SCCM Site which will have a Central Site and a Primary Site in which to serve clients. The Primary Site has been configured with a Standard Doc I wrote. The Central site has had limited changes and as such the agents I have refrained from configuring too much. We have a remote office (italy) which already has a 15 seat VDI solution running out of a UK based data centre and is functioning fine. When the initial process was taken on ( prior to my start) the organisation were advised on potential issues with VDI clients requiring different agent settings compared to normal desktops that were such performance and general working conditions could be affected. As such they plan to span these 15 users directly off the central site rather than it pointing to the Primary Site and in turn from primary to central. I am not overly keen on this as from a design perspective it is not great and think it is better they report into the Primary direct, otherwise you end up needing a DP on the central as these clients could potentially recieve software deployments/ Software Updates etc etc. Has anyone had any experience in VDI and SCCM from this perspective??? Are there any best practices that should be adhered to??? Currently the company do not know if/how it will expand so putting in another Primary just for the VDI clients seems a waste right now. If you have any links/docs I would be greatly appreciated. Thanks LeeLee Martin

Have you already had a look at the other threads about VDI? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/systemcenter/cm?query=VDI&rq=meta:Search.MSForums.GroupID(2a118fc8-6e85-4637-821e-4231d2eef7c9)+site:microsoft.com&rn=All+System+Center+Configuration+Manager+Forums Which "different agent settings" are you talking about?Torsten Meringer | http://www.mssccmfaq.de

I had not seen these, thanks i will have a look through as what im after i have not found on net so far. What im specifically referring to is on the primary site server itself, the individual agent settings i.e. Software inventory, hardware inventory etc etc. It has been suggested that for the vdi clients having all of these enabled (or a large proPortion on) Has a knock on effect on the vdi client itself with relation to performance. Therefore they are considering hanging it directly from central so they can have one set of agent settings there and on set on the child primary that will have most turned on for rest of the estate. In my implementations so far it has not included VDI therefore its difficult to argus the case without some concrete info to go on??? Has anyone had any experience or configured in a different way? Appreciate any thoughtsLee Martin

As a further update to this, it would seem that although 2012 would resolve this as client agent settings are not on a per site basis, however with 2007 requiring this option I have come across the ability to essentially create a local policy for the agent that will overide the settings coming down from the management point. Has anyone had any experince doing this? Specifically essentially turning off the hardware inventory agent for the VDI clients locally using a MOF file. Appreciate any advice. Thanks LeeLee Martin

Yes. Local policies are an effective and supported (if not straight-forward) method for settings client agent settings granularly. Remember however that Hardware Inventory is not really hardware inventory. It's really WMI inventory and responsible for nearly all the data that ConfigMgr collects from clients including AI.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys

Thanks for your reply. Can you see a feasible way in which to turn this off within a local policy for these clients??? Essentially it would be the same as not having that agent set at the parent site? Regards LeeLee Martin

Further to that if you have Hardware Inventory turned of in the 'correct' way, this still enables the AI etc etc agents to work so can this be replicated locally?Lee Martin

Can you see a feasible way in which to turn this off within a local policy for these clients??? Essentially it would be the same as not having that agent set at the parent site? Yes, using a local policy, if you want to selectively turn off the agent is the way to go and yes it has the same effect on the client as if turning it off in the site's settings.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys

Further to that if you have Hardware Inventory turned of in the 'correct' way, this still enables the AI etc etc agents to work so can this be replicated locally? Not sure what you're asking here. AI uses Hardware Inventory; no, HW Inv, no AI. This will of course only affect those systems that you disable HW Inv on which may be acceptable. I was making sure you understood that HW Inv is not just for hardware and that it collects its info from WMI including things like Add/Remove Programs and items that AI depends upon.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys

Sorry for not being clear. Essentially with the VDI clients I have no experience myself of it causing issues of performance but going on the fact that it does they have been advised that something like Hardware Inventory could cause the issue and as such to turn it off. I notice when you say hardware inventory is not really/just hardware inventory, essentially what are all of the aspects would this affect if this is turned off, i.e. how much would you lose from a reporting perspective so Asset Intelligence etc??? With regards to the point of being able to turn off the Hardware Inventory do you have any examples/advise on how to tackle this? I have looked at my test client with Policy Spy but there is not obvious Hardware Inventory Agent to disable in the Default or Recieved tabs, and there does not seem to be a whole lot out there hence posing question on here Thanks Lee Martin

Just about all data comes in via Hardware Inventory. Just open up resource explorer on a system in the console and look under the hardware node. Anything there, won't be there if you disable HW inv. The performance hit right now comes from the fact that the inv times are based on the installation times of the agent. If you are using a master image in any way, this will obviously be the same across the board and so all of your clients will run the Inv at the same time. HW inv usually is super-low impact, but if you have a lot of VDI guests n the same system kicking off inventory at the same time, that could be a big hit. Software Inv is usually the bigger hit and would be the first one to turn off IMO. Actually IMO, SW inv is nearly useless anyway so I don't recommend anyone turn it on by default anyway. So, the best answer here would be to use a local policy to somehow randomize the start times of the Inv agent. I haven't looked specifically at doing this though but would imagine its possible. Here's a good article for local policies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.09.customizesms.aspx.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys