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Hi, my name is Paul. I'm an employee in a relatively small enterprise (about 700 persons), let's call it Comp-A. My collegue and me are about to make up an SCCM hierarchy for our enterprise. We need to present it next week, which is a bit short, alas. And here are things getting complicated. I'll explain our situation. SCCM will we used to deploy pc's, servers and mobile devices for ourselves. Comp-A consists of three buildings in one city and two sattelites in two other cities. Bandwidth is no problem, we have enough fibers. So Comp-A could do with one primary site and no CAS. BUT. There is also Comp-B, about 1400 employees, this company has her own domain and her own buildings. It is totally independent. But the firewalls between Comp-A and B are wide open, due to policital reasons. We are twins. There is also Comp-C, about 120 employees. It's the same scenario: it's a seperate company but the firewalls are wide open. So we aren't twins, we are three ! Next, we have Comp-D and Comp-E. For those two we deliver pc's and their configurations and updates etc. You get the picture, Comp-A is what you could call a "service provider" for the other companies. We live in some kind of symbiose with them. Now, knowing all this, how would you organise SCCM? CAS/no CAS? SQL remote or local? Primary site in every Comp or not? And what about redundancy and high availability? We do have a huge data center with hundreds of virtual servers, fibers everywhere, a SAN, so resources are no problem.

As SCCM 2012 is set to come out soon, we're in research mode for SCCM 2012 hierarchy installation. Our environment is as follows: All Windows OS Shop Clients: Run Windows XP, and will be upgraded to Windows 7 x64 Enterprise within 3 months Servers: Active Directory Windows 2008 R2 mode User count: 260 desktops (~30 laptops) Server count: ~60 (almost all of them are virtual running on VMWare ESX 4) Servers are located at our datacenter (spoke) and about twelve remote offices, this includes corporate ~90 users, (hubs). Based on our device/user count we've come up with two installation designs, and I'd like to hear your comments on both. 1. Single server installation - opting to move some system roles base on performance (if needed). 6 vCPUs - 64 GB Ram - ~1 TB storage Note: In the event that we notice poor performance, we intend to move some roles off this server (we would probably move DP, SUP, EPP and the SQL installation). I'd like to hear some comments about this approach. 2. Three server installation - a database server, a DP role server (SUP and EPP) and a primary site. Primary site server: 4 vCPU - 16 GB Ram SQL Server: 6 vCPU - 32 GB Ram Distribution Point: 4 vCPU - 16 GB Ram - additional storage I'd like to hear some comments on both approach, thanks for your time.