Install timeline

[Edenost]

Hi All,

 

First of all, apologies if this has been answered somewhere already. There is just such a vast amount of information about System Center on here, it's difficult to find something as specific as this I believe.

 

Anyway, I am an Infrastructure Engineer at the moment, tasked with installed SCCM 2016 along with SCOM 2016.

The company I'm working for currently (just started with them) have nothing really in place for remote/DC management or monitoring (hence installing SCCM and SCOM).

 

I have worked with SCCM 2012 in the past, implementing it in to a school a couple of year back now, but I haven't used it since moving on from that job, but I know it fairly well from that and I have installed a couple of labs checking out the updates between then and now. I have never used SCOM other than a quick lab, but I didn't really use it... just installed it to check the process out and make sure I understood it.

 

I've been working for a week on the project now, where I have got myself my own VLAN and installed a test domain with:

 

2 DC's (2 different domains as I have never done cross domain management with SCCM before, nor SCOM of course - One of them has the Gateway role installed for SCOM).

3 SQL Servers (1 for SCCM, 2 for SCOM)

1 SCCM Server

1 SCOM Management Server

2 Windows 10 desktops (1 on each domain, for the purpose of testing more than anything else).

 

I ran in to a snag, where the SCOM Management server decided to loose it's trust with the DC, but I can't get it back, so for speed, I'm just going to kill the 2 SQL servers and the Management server and start that again on Monday morning (shouldn't take long to get back to where I was as I didn't do a lot with it other than install a couple of MP's, and let it sort it self out really).

 

Anyway, I feel that my manager is feeling I'm taking too long on just the testing phase.

Given how much data/information there is to know about System Center, and never having used much of it other than SCCM, I want to make sure I get it right. I've done it in the past where I've ticked the wrong option somewhere and killed my install, or didn't install something correctly, so I've needed to just start over... you know? I feel with something as big and deep as System Center, if you're going to do it, you want to do it right first time (in production).

 

I'm happy for SCCM to go live, where I would install it again for production, but SCOM I need to reinstall on the test and make sure I can get it to talk across the two domains (we have a lot of domains, which are not part of the same forest, but there will be two way trusts in place when I'm ready for them - I'm using the Gateway server for ease/simplicity).

 

I'm, thinking, given that I haven't ever used SCOM before, a week, maybe 2 weeks of testing and getting to grips with it is more than fair. When I taught myself SCCM (with this forum as help... THANK YOU ANYWEB!!!), it took me numerous attempts and 3 months to get the testing done until I was comfortable in myself to install it on a live environment (which is also fairly large I might add).

 

I just wanted to get some other people's opinions or experiences on the timelines for getting one of both of these installed on an already live environment which customers are using and relying on, on a daily basis.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

 

Phil

[surfincow]

When I originally inherited the SCCM responsibilities at my current job it was running 2007. When time came to move to 2012, I opted for a consultant to come help as I felt the original implementation wasn't done exactly the best (I don't blame the previous person though. I'm sure they set it up the best they knew at the time and learned as they went) and I figured moving to the new version I'd rather have it done right rather than deal with the consequences later.

 

I believe he was here about a week helping to get the system setup. At that, its a system setup. Still lots and lots and LOTS to do. Re-creating / creating all the packages, switching them to applications when beneficial, getting updates working right and figuring out the deployment rules, etc etc etc. Probably took a few more weeks to get things at the point where I felt OK distributing the client and getting our workstations managed. Probably 6 months later I felt comfortable enough with it that we decided to move the patching of servers to sccm rather than WSUS.

 

Fast forward a few years where I've been taking care of the thing and we need to upgrade to Current Branch. Since there was not a good upgrade path, I rebuilt everything from scratch. Since I'm a lot more familiar with it, learned a lot from the consultant and had a better idea of how I wanted to implement it I went ahead and did it on my own. Again, building out the systems and so forth easily took a week. Then working on the odd bugs (ah yes, this time I did decide to migrate packages and applications and ran into issues. Found out that's something that was never tested before the final version was released so there were problems....)

 

Still after saving time by migrating data, it would be another few weeks before I felt things were good enough to move the clients over. At that point I was still hesitant about moving the servers over so it was another few weeks after the workstation migration that I moved the servers. There's just so much that can go wrong that I'd rather make sure everything works before rolling it out.

 

I'm sure next time we need to re-deploy it I'll cut the time down even more but there's a huge difference between having the infrastructure built for SCCM and being able to do all the things SCCM lets you to do. The "making it work and do what you want it to" is the part that takes the longest time.

 

Presently I'm in the same boat as you (different OS though). Need to deploy a system for managing Mac's and of course everyone wants it yesterday. The system we are going with compared to SCCM is dead simple amazing, but after working with SCCM for so long I'm used to how managing PC's works and getting used to a different way of doing it is difficult.

 

For the SCCM part (and even my new project) the place I work at is pretty open if we need to call in external help for things. Don't know about where you work but if you are getting stuck and its delaying things, having someone come in who's gone through the setup numerous times might be a good idea. I have no idea about SCOM, but I know I would not have felt comfortable deploying SCCM the first time without any outside help. Fairly sure if I had it would have been a mess

 

Good luck with your project. If it helps, I once saw it mentioned here that when quoting time frames for SCCM installs, if the SQL server is remote he always adds a week