Preferred Management Points

[BrianM]

I have my Hierarchy set to use the management points specified in boundary groups. So far I have three boundary groups that have Site Systems tied to them. My issue is the clients in each boundary group seem to be spreading evenly over the available site servers.

 

 

I have one site that is advertised in AD

I have AD Sites defined in AD.

My goal is to have each local Domain Controller to be a site system server that will manage the local machines. I don't want to use secondary sites.

 

I push out the clients from the console with the default settings and they install without an issue. I realize I could set the initial mp during the install but that seems like an unnecessary step.

 

Am I missing something obvious or is there a config I can run on the existing clients to have them push to their local mp? When I am done I am going to have 19 mp's and 400+ pc's. I'd like to nip this now if it is a configuration problem.

 

Thanks,

[HotdogSCCM]

 

When I am done I am going to have 19 mp's and 400+ pc's. I'd like to nip this now if it is a configuration problem.

 

I understand you're using a Domain Controller per site, which in and of itself isn't a good idea (IIS on a DC = not recommended), but that's just a lot of MPs for that tiny of a site.

 

From a flat recommendation, unless you're very bandwidth limited, or constrained by network some other way (ie, ports), just do MPs in a "datacenter", and let clients transverse the WAN for policy. Much easier.

 

That said, if you DO want to make MPs follow boundary groups, you need to:

 

1) Install CU1 for SP1. There's a known issue with SP1 that doesn't let the "Preferred MP" checkbox work in a stand alone primary site.

 

"The "Clients prefer to use management points specified in boundary groups" setting is not honored on a stand-alone primary site."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3074857

 

2) Enable "Clients prefer to use management points specified in boundary groups" under "Hierarchy Settings". Then assign the MPs to the boundary groups, and in theory, magic should occur and clients will follow the specified option.

 

Personally, I ended up using a CI to assign workstations to MPs via the AllowedMPs registry key, due to network configuration at my company; they had multiple DMZes that made client rotation incredibly bad.