Too Many Collections?

[king13p]

Hello everyone,

 

I just started a new job about a month ago in a school district with mostly windows machines and iPads. One of the rules I've been put into is the role of Managing images and PCs with SCCM. When I started, everyone came up to me and said things are really slow with imaging and they would like for me to find a solution. So I watched the process. The imaging part seems fine its afterwards it takes about 6 hours for Applications to start coming down to the PC. When I looked at the device collections I was kinda shocked. There are over 550 Collections. Is this way over the top? I mean every Room in our district has a collection, Every application has a collection, There are also collections for each building, and each model of machine.

 

I told my co-worker that this has too be too much, When I try to move a machine into a new collection using a direct rule, it takes 2 Hours to appear in that collection! He doesn't seem to believe that 550 is too many. I'm not too experience with SCCM, so if I'm wrong please tell me. If anyone works for any bigger company it would also be great to hear how many collections you have. I would think with 550 collections all trying to run a query to find out what machines belong in it would probably be the reason why we are lagging.

 

Any help would be Greatly Appreciated!

 

THANKS!

[kukulka]

It depends how often do you update your collections. If it's very often and all at the same time it can be an issue.

Right click on random collections, go to membership rules and check your collection update schedule.

 

How long does it take for the computer to appear in the collection if you manually update membership by right clicking on the collection?

Do you have software metering enabled?

[Rocket Man]

The question is how many rooms/labs are there in the district and how many deployments are targeted to the same system that is a member of the many different collections?

 

I work in education sector myself and at present I have approx 12 campuses/schools managed by a single PS with approx 20 more to add. At present between 2 larger campuses, 4 large schools, 2 main offices and the rest of the sites there are approx 90-100 collections created with some odd 15 custom collections also. The main collections query AD to pull out systems from the OUs, so basically my SCCM asset management is a mirror of AD give or take some custom collections. But everyone's environment is different, but generally speaking in schools, computer collections tend to stay quite static(labs, classrooms etc..) and user collections can change quite frequent(staff,students etc..yearly)

 

Having a rough educated guess at this......It sounds like that your systems are members of many collections...each with policies deployed, so this is why the applications maybe slow as they are running other policies from other deployments from other collections...if that makes sense.

[king13p]

It depends how often do you update your collections. If it's very often and all at the same time it can be an issue.

Right click on random collections, go to membership rules and check your collection update schedule.

 

How long does it take for the computer to appear in the collection if you manually update membership by right clicking on the collection?

Do you have software metering enabled?

 

Thanks for the reply, I have checked a few of them, They say Between 5 and 6 hours for updating.

 

Even if I choose to Update Membership, it still takes a few hours before it actually shows up in the collection.

 

Software Metering is Enabled, It says it occurs every 5 days.

 

 

The question is how many rooms/labs are there in the district and how many deployments are targeted to the same system that is a member of the many different collections?

 

I work in education sector myself and at present I have approx 12 campuses/schools managed by a single PS with approx 20 more to add. At present between 2 larger campuses, 4 large schools, 2 main offices and the rest of the sites there are approx 90-100 collections created with some odd 15 custom collections also. The main collections query AD to pull out systems from the OUs, so basically my SCCM asset management is a mirror of AD give or take some custom collections. But everyone's environment is different, but generally speaking in schools, computer collections tend to stay quite static(labs, classrooms etc..) and user collections can change quite frequent(staff,students etc..yearly)

 

Having a rough educated guess at this......It sounds like that your systems are members of many collections...each with policies deployed, so this is why the applications maybe slow as they are running other policies from other deployments from other collections...if that makes sense.

 

Okay so Looking back on this, 550 was wrong, We have 708 Building Collections. Pretty much 1 for each room in our district. So in grand total we have 1031 Collections. Is there any way for me to actually tell how many deployments are targeted to the same system that is a member of many different collections? I know we have a collection for each app, It doesn't appear that the Campus Collections actually deploy anything. Someone must have set them up just to organize them a bit better or something.

 

Thanks for the help!

[l.hv.yang]

are the updates being updated incrementally? that's a killer. check colleval.log on your site server.

[king13p]

Under Properties of each collection I tried, Use incremental updates for this collection is not checked. Is there anything special I'm looking for in colleval.log?

[l.hv.yang]

when you 'update' a collection, open up colleval.log to see what's actually happening...any errors? messages? etc..

 

also, i tend to stay away from 'direct rules' and use 'query rules' / 'list of values' if i want to directly add a system to a collection

[king13p]

I have a few more questions,

 

My Co-Worker was out of town for a month so I used a script to set Update Schedules for collections from 2-4 Hours to 1 Week. I also disabled all incremental updates except for All Systems and Windows 7 Machines. When I set the update times back to a week I was able to finally add machines to a collection almost instantly. Within a 10 seconds the machine showed up in the collection. How are the rest of you guys deploying software instantly to a machine if instantly is even possible? The way I am thinking it should work is Have a collection for the software you want to deploy, EX Google Chrome, Put a machine in the collection, Since it takes a while to update I will just Right Click the collection and choose Update Membership, Within a few seconds I will see the machine in the collection and then within an Hour i believe the machine should start installing Google Chrome, Depending on Client Update settings, Is that correct? I could also use the Right Click Tools to do a Machine Policy Retrieval to get it started sooner? Or is it a different one.

 

Thanks