SCOM and SCCM:

n30_mkii

n30_mkii

n30_mkii

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HI there has anyone touched on either of these?

SCCM I prosume is the next incarnation of SMS
SCOM the next MOM?

I'm looking at courses/study for the next year, are there a lot of companies going to be looking at this? I know SMS is a biggy so SCCM is likely to be, but have never really heard much about MOM.

It's definatley something that looks interesting and certainly relevant to the current issue we have with Auiditing deployment etc.

Anyone have any thoughts on these?
 
Dont really have an ultra strong opinion on these products - I use/deploy/sell/manage competitve applications.

MOM/SCOM is the one I'm more familiar with and from what I have seen its quite good.

SCCM is in my opinion too big a product to ever be used in a truly effective way. Its trying to wear too many different hats in my book: Patching, Builds, Asset, Applicaiton Installs etc. I prefer more specialized tools for each job.

Architecturally SCCM is a little heavy on infrastructure requirements (staging servers) for my current project.

One thing I have noticed however is there is very little serious training for these products out there. I suspect that the MS courses teach you what features are there but then you'll spend the next couple of years trying to realise the potential.
 
We installed SCE 07 in Nov 07, and have not seend any proper documentation, or book, or training courses from anyone on the product. Its the baby version of SCOM. Which is pants (the lack of any real help from MS).
 
My job is primarily SMS, I'm upgrading it all to SCCM in the near future. Went on a course for it but tbh it is pretty much the same as SMS, only did the course to give me the extra bits needed for the exam.

Personally I like SMS/SCCM, it's easy to use and works well for everything I use it for. It's used for patch management, asset info and app deployment mostly, but all the reporting functionailty is also put to good use. Don't use the OS deployment side as I don't like it and my current ghost setup is a lot quicker and easier. But apart from that pretty much all of SMS being used (vanilla, no feature packs).

Haven't found it heavy on infrastructure requirements myself, a server at each site does the trick but I know with SCCM you have the ability to add more servers in for different roles. But a lot of it can just be kept on the same box, splitting roles off to different servers is for pretty big implementations.

I did a week long course with QA IQ or whatever they are called this week, it was alright. Trainer was a nice guy who I had before for a course (250 miles away!).

We also have SCOM and tbh it does the job but it's not difficult at all.

If you have any specific questions shoot me an email (in trust).
 
Although remember it doesn't need to be an msi, sccm/sms will run any file that can be run, not like GPO that'll only do your MSI.
 
And that's the way to do software packaging imho, do it the way you are most comfortable with. Else it all goes to poop when you get it wrong :p

I've known contractors try to do it one way just because that's what other people do, who are obsessed with making everythign an msi, and they've stuffed things right up. Guess I shouldn't complain though, it's their wrong doings that got me the job in the first place :p
 
Ev0 said:
Although remember it doesn't need to be an msi, sccm/sms will run any file that can be run, not like GPO that'll only do your MSI.
Click to expand...
Ive heard that said about SCCM as well, but its simply not true imo.
Whilst SCCM or whatever other app may claim that it can package anything and deploy it, it still has restrictions on the apps it can do, what formats, ect;.

SCCM is claimed that it can do MSIs, exes, msps, zaps, ect;, but all of them are dependent on command switches bar MSIs & MSPs.
Everything that you can deploy with SCCM can be done with GPO's if you know how. Its just not as nice an interface to use.

Anyway, SCCM, nice product, but as said by another poster, its trying to do too much.
A properly configured SCCM system can do a heck of a lot for a network, but the problem is the time it takes to configure all of its agents to do what you want without bringing the network down.

Ive had it sat on a dedicated server for it at work for almost 2 months now, but i havnt gotten around to configuring it properly yet. :p.
 
BoomAM said:
Ive heard that said about SCCM as well, but its simply not true imo.
Whilst SCCM or whatever other app may claim that it can package anything and deploy it, it still has restrictions on the apps it can do, what formats, ect;.

SCCM is claimed that it can do MSIs, exes, msps, zaps, ect;, but all of them are dependent on command switches bar MSIs & MSPs.
Everything that you can deploy with SCCM can be done with GPO's if you know how. Its just not as nice an interface to use.
Click to expand...

Not sure if it's just me reading your post wrong, but SCCM/SMS is not a packaging tool, it's a deployment tool.

The command switch thing, and running things silently, is not part of SMS, that's the software packaging process that preceeds it getting to SMS/SCCM. A GPO will still only run msi's though won't it? So you would need to repackage non msis for GPO deployment, whereas SMS/SCCM will run them without the need to.

I see it as SMS/SCCM is purely there to run something, not to do all the silent/config stuff, that's for the software package to do.

As a deployment tool it will and can run any file you give it that can be run. I'm not talking about stuff I've read in documentation, I'm talking about working with SMS for 6+ years and using it just like this in live environments :)

Personally I really don't think SCCM is trying to do to much, although as I said before I don't like the OS deployment side of things and have stayed away from that.
 
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Ev0 said:
Not sure if it's just me reading your post wrong, but SCCM/SMS is not a packaging tool, it's a deployment tool.
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You have. :p
My point is that SCCM is vaunted as being able to deploy more things that GPO's, but if you know how to use GPOs, you can do everything SCCM can with GPOs in regards to deployment types. The only advantage is scheduling the deployments.

A GPO will still only run msi's though won't it? So you would need to repackage non msis for GPO deployment, whereas SMS/SCCM will run them without the need to.
Click to expand...
Nope, you can do normal *.exes or whatever else with GPOs, you have them set as startup/shutdown/logon/logoff scripts.
 
BoomAM said:
You have. :p
My point is that SCCM is vaunted as being able to deploy more things that GPO's, but if you know how to use GPOs, you can do everything SCCM can with GPOs in regards to deployment types. The only advantage is scheduling the deployments.
Click to expand...

heh I know how to use GPOs :)

And the only advantage is scheduling you say? I'd say there were more advantages such as query based collection membership and status reporting being 2 huge ones.

BoomAM said:
Nope, you can do normal *.exes or whatever else with GPOs, you have them set as startup/shutdown/logon/logoff scripts.
Click to expand...

Yeah of course you can run anything as a startup and shutdown script. Not a pretty way to implement it though :)

Like most things though, a lot is personal preference and you can things with GPOs that SMS will do too. Personally I find it invaluable to have.
 
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Ev0 said:
heh I know how to use GPOs :) And the only advantage is schduling you say? I'd say there were more advantages such as query based collection membership and status reporting being 2 huge ones.
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Wasnt implying that you didnt.:)
Those advantages are outside of software deployments though.
The specification specific installs can be done via WMI iirc as well.

Yeah of course you can run anything as a startup and shutdown script. Not a pretty way to implement it though :)
Click to expand...
Its not technically any different to how SCCM would go about it though?
Or are you refering to login times, ect; ?
 
BoomAM said:
Wasnt implying that you didnt.:)
Those advantages are outside of software deployments though.
The specification specific installs can be done via WMI iirc as well.
Click to expand...

To me those are part of the software deployment process, I like to know which machines require the software and also if it worked or not :)

WMI is great though, so much can be done with it!

BoomAM said:
Its not technically any different to how SCCM would go about it though?
Or are you refering to login times, ect; ?
Click to expand...

I guess not, with gpos you'd just be adding machines to groups so no real difference there, but yeah it'll only install on next login/logoff/startup/shutdown etc. Also how do you handle source locations with GPOs, i.e. if you have multiple sites do you just have one install source and run everything over the wan? Or have some kind of DFS type thing setup?

If we didn't have SMS then I'd be whoring GPOs for all they are worth as you can do so much with them. But we need all the bits you don't get with that enough to warrant using SMS. It's not really expensive either, and once setup it's a breeze to run.

The problem I've found is people not knowing/understanding it all and it tends to sit in the corner gathering dust. Or people just use it for say the remote control tools, such a waste :( When you get a chance to have a gd play with it drop me a line (in trust) if you want to ask anything, always happy to help and push this :p

I've been having fun upgrading the db from sql 2000 to 2005 today, no idea why the monkey before me decided to use 2000. The amount of stuff he did wrong I could kill him lol, and he was on £500 a day for the pleasure!
 
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I've got to deploy this at work in one of our domains, any recommendations on books etc? I've not going any background in SMS etc. Just a lowly Server / Firewall admin
 
Never needed or used a book for this kind of thing, but take a look over on myitforum.com as there's loads of info and instructions on how to do various things if you're stuck.

tbh it's not rocket science to set this kind of thing up, what kind of size organisation is it? How many physical sites, and how many clients on each site? And what are the network links like to each site? The answers to those questions will be the foundation of how you setup your infrastructure.
 
We use it.It's great. We had some teething problems. Deployment is pretty easy. If it's difficult, it's the fault of the s/w vendor in my opinion.All SCCM does is run the 'command' on the machine for you. We havn't got around to using Branch Deployment Points yet but we will in the near future.

I find one of the most useful bits of it is the reporting tools - it's pretty good for asset management. Particularly if you are looking to find all machines with the required specification for software 'x'.. Put in the required specification and query SCCM to find machines which meet (or don't meet) that specification.

We don't use it for patch management. We use standalone wsus. We are currently investigating the OS Deployment. I'll reserve opinion on this. I think we may just go for standalone Windows Deployment Toolkit though. At first glance it looks pretty good. I am slightly worried about the speed of it though. We currently use Ghost (an older version), which is quick, but image management is a problem.
 
I've stuck with ghost as that can build a machine and install all the base software in about 10 minutes, this takes longer.
 
Ev0 - were you using LiteTouch for that? Also were you deloying from a 2008 Server which supports Multicast (I believe?) I understand that if you install MDT onto 2003 Server then you can only unicast. We are getting ~10minutes with Ghost at the moment. I'm willing to sacrifice some time in order to get better management of images. Our Ghost version is fairly old and pretty poor, in fairness.
 
I had a dabble with the OSD feature pack in SMS 2003 ages ago and it wasn't great, will probably take another look when I do the SCCM upgrade here but can't see me moving away from ghost yet.

Using Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, we only have a couple of model types for our machines so the images are very easy to manage.

Just have a base no frills image with office and nothing else on, this gets updated when I feel like it just to make sure it has the latest windows etc updates on out of the box but they get patched as soon as they are built so don't really need to do that.

Then once an image is deployed I have ghost perform a post image task of running an SMS Installer script I have that puts all the crap on like flash, any other core software etc.

The good thing about this method is say I have a new version of flash, I just update my script, the image doesn't need touching.

The thing I don't like about ghost is how the console isn't supported/designed for a multi site environment. I've customised a few bits to make some things easier but it does have to be run as a seperate system on each site. I was hoping that if you specified the image to be on a remote machine on a different subnet when imaging the machine it would just pull it locally. But it seems it pulls traffic through the ghost server :(
 
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