Requesting Suggestions and Recommendations on SCCM OSD Centralised Management

[Vinay Kumar C]

Hi,

 

We are in the process of deciding on if we have to go for centralized management of OSD or De-centralized way.

 

Here is the overview of the hierarchy. We have a central, 5 Primaries and 20 Secondary sites, we have 5 PXE servers connected to primary site servers.We have installed PXE service point role on all the secondary site servers as well but we have not hosted a image on the secondary sites for now. I have successfully tested windows 7 ZTI on all the primaries. I am able to successfully join the machines to domain and the respective OU's as well.

 

All the servers are running on Windows Server 2003 SP2, SCCM Sp2 R3.

 

Now that the pilot testing on primary site successful our management wants to go for mass Deployment of OSD on more than 6500 Machines in 1 month.

 

Is it recommended to have de-centralized management of OSD or centralized management. We have a requirement that once the machine joins domain it has to move to a specific OU. OU's are segregated based on regions, Laptops and Desktops.

 

I am interested to know the Advantages and Dis-advantages of having centralized management of OSD.

 

Will running of many task sequences at the same time impact the central site server's performance.

 

Requesting comments and recommendations on the same.

 

Regards,

 

Vinay

[anyweb]

i'd say go centralised, do all your task sequence editing/creation on central and let it trickle down to the child sites, are your management points/distribution points on the child primaries ready for the initial load ? are software updates involved ?

[Vinay Kumar C]

i'd say go centralised, do all your task sequence editing/creation on central and let it trickle down to the child sites, are your management points/distribution points on the child primaries ready for the initial load ? are software updates involved ?

 

 

Hi,

 

I have pilot tested OSD ZTI from all primaries. I hope that is what you meant by child primaries ready for initial Load.

 

We have monthly software updates as a seperate task. I am not using install software updates from Task Sequence.

 

One more thought i have had is if we deploy from primary site server we can have 5 Task sequences running at the same time and if any task sequence fails then we can troubleshoot individually but if the deployment happens from central then the entire OSD is halted.

 

Please suggest.

 

Regards,

 

Vinay

[Joe]

if we deploy from primary site server we can have 5 Task sequences running at the same time and if any task sequence fails then we can troubleshoot individually but if the deployment happens from central then the entire OSD is halted.

 

Can you elaborate on this?

 

Deployment is all based on Advertisements. If you build 6,500 machines, and 1 of them fails, it isn't going to impact the other 6,499. You will be able to examine the failed build and troubleshoot it. If it fails, you should be able to PXE boot again and restart the build immediately.