A couple months ago on TechEd Europe, the SCCM team presented the new official product name for the upcoming version of SCCM. The name will be System Center Configuration Manager 2012. Last month we had the a CEP session, due to other meetings at the office I couldn’t be there on the live ‘meeting’. So today I saw the recording of this meeting and here are the new things about Hierarchy.

The session started with a introduction from Jeff Wettlaufer. He told us that the Beta 2 release is scheduled for the Spring of 2011. After the short introduction D.C. Trady started his presentation about Hierarchy Simplification. He started with some Infrastructure promises. The following topics about the infrastructure will be improved:

• Minimizing Infrastructure at remote offices
• Consolidating Infrastructure a primary sites
• Scalability and Data latency improvements ( Central site will be used for Administration, System generated data can be configured to flow to CAS directly and file processing occurs once at a Primary Site)
• Industry Standard SQL Replication will reduce operational costs and simplifies troubleshooting

The picture below shows the improvements/differences about Site-Server Characteristics:

After that he presented the reasons why you need the different site servers:

1. Central Administration Site

• With more than 1 primary sites you can link them together in 1 hierarchy
• For offloading the administration and reporting part

2. Primary Site

• To manage clients
• Add more Primary sites for the following reasons:
  • Scale (more than 100.000 clients)
  • Reduce impact of Primary site server failure
  • Local point of connectivity for administration
  • Political reasons
  • Content source relating to regulation

   

3. Secondary Site

• No Local Administrator
• If you need to manage upward-flowing WAN traffic
• If you need tiered content routing for deep network topologies

When you are not concerned about the following topics you can also use a Distribution point instead of a Secondary Site Server:

• Not concerned with upward-flowing WAN traffic
• Not concerned about clients pulling data to their primary site location
• When you need scheduling and throttling for your WAN traffic

Some other improvements about Hierarchy Simplification:

• Improved Data Replication Model
• Collections are now globally evaluated at all sites. Clients from any site which meets the requirements will me member of that collection.
• Improvements on Role Based Administration
  • RBA enables mapping the organizational roles of administration directly to built-in security roles
  • Admins only see what they have access to
  • Management of security is further simplified by enabling administrative security for the entire hierarchy

   

• Client Agent settings can be changed based on Collections