Moderated by: Sponsored by:

John Nelson, SCCM 2009 MVP &President, Minnesota System Center User Group

Ask John + Stump the Expert + JN Gems

14 September 2011

• Welcome• Introduction• A word from your sponsors

– BDNA & myITforum

• John Nelson– Ask John + Stump the Expert + JN Gems

• Wrap Up

Agenda

• Reed Porter Google+ Hangout: http://bit.ly/GPsccmguru

• myITforum SCCM GURU webcast live forum http://myITforum.com/SCCMguru

Google+ Hangouts & Forums

• Walker White, CTO

BDNA Normalize & SCCM

• Rod Trent, myITforum– All things “System Center”– Since 1999– Large and growing community (120,000

visitors a day)– Huge storehouse of System Center

knowledge– Noobies to experts– Even John is hanging around at myITforum

myITforum

About John Nelson

• SMS/Config Manager guy with a focus on SQL since 1996

• Currently working on the engineering side of the Configuration

Management & Provisioning team at a Fortune 50 company

• Successfully completed all kinds of server administration,

SMS/SCCM administration, packaging, scripting, development,

Oracle and SQL report writing, querying, performance/scalability

testing and teaching over the years

• Selected to present at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS)

in Las Vegas in 2008 and 2009.

• Awarded the Microsoft MVP award in 2009 for System Center

Configuration Manager

• President of the Minnesota System Center User Group

1. Get your TOUGHEST questions answered, get your BIGGEST problems solved.

2. Get your GAME ON! Challenge “The SQL God” and see if you can stump the expert – the most interesting challenge will receive an SCCM GURU jacket.

3. Get some serious bling, SCCM BLING that is, in the form of John Nelson gems, tips and tricks that he will share.

John’s Agenda

• All questions, answered and not answered, on this webcast will have responses posted on John’s blog – Number 2 – on myITforum so please check back there in the following weeks.

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jnelson/

All questions answered!

• Can you explain what "Max degree of Parallelism" is, and how should I configure that?

Max degree of Parallelism

• IPAddress or Subnet produce multiple rows in reports; how can I write a report to fix that? Same for OU.

Multiple rows in reports

• Troubleshooting if something is a ConfigMgr problem vs a SQL problem is sometimes difficult to pinpoint. Where and what logs are the first places you check when troubleshooting?

Troubleshooting

• Often, we see SQL Server 2008 SP2, 64-bit consume all of max memory. Multiple blogs discuss that this is by design and there are even suggested tables on setting up upper limits on SQL for SCCM. Please share you knowlege on what is correct and best practice on memory capacity planning and allocation of SQL Sever 2008 for SCCM 2007.

Memory capacity planning

• I've heard you mention 'indexing' tables in the configmgr database that aren't indexed by default out of the box.

Which tables do you recommend and why? What should I index, and from a "I only know just enough about SQL because it's part of CM point of view"...

Do you have a blog or some directions on how to index, and how to determine it's working as expected without impact?

Indexing tables

• I just installed SCCM2007 R3 and I want to do some testing on a handful of computers. How do I throttle SCCM so I don’t impact other computers? Do I limit the boundary to a single IP range or create a custom collection?

SCCM2007 R3 testing

• We have different teams in parts of the world supporting our Windows Architecture that like to snoop around AD. Do you have a recommended permissions model for locking down SCCM Site Servers, all while allowing AD user and computer accounts access via AD domain groups?

Lock SCCM site servers

• Can you use SQL to extract from SCCM the software that is installed on a certain machine or group of machines and bring it into another SQL Server System. What is the best possible way to do this? Live, using extracts, DTS or something else?

Use SQL to extract software

• I am having this strange issue where computers do not show up in the collection, but show under the Membership Rules properties. Would you know what is the likely cause, and how it can be resolved?

Membership Rules properties

• We are currently using Altiris for a Configuration Management Database and are in the process of deploying SCCM. Will it be possible to eliminate Altiris by using SCCM as the basis for pulling all required information into a SQL database that we can use as a CMDB? We currently pull custom created windows registry items as well as standard hardware and software information. Will it be able to pull custom information from Linux/Unix servers as well by using 3rd party products such as Quest?

Use SCCM to pull all info

• What are the best ways to keep SCCM clients healthy? Any recommended repair scripts or other automatic methods? (Fixing WMI corruption. atl.dll re-registering, etc.)

Keep SCCM clients healthy

• Microsoft Support requested me to run SQL Query <sp_MSforeachtable "DBCC DBREINDEX ('?')"> on my ConfigMgr DB to improve performance. And obviously it increased performance dramatically. This is good so far, but the question still stays, why does the regular "Reindex Database" Task in ConfigMgr not take care of the reindexing. What is your best practice regarding re-indexing?

"Reindex Database"

• What is best, with a high speed connection, SQL on the SCCM box or on a VM. I have had different experts tell me different things.

SCCM box vs VM

• Just getting ready to implement SCCM. We will have a vendor design and install it and.... Two questions: First, what do you hire a vendor for and what should you take on internally? Second, What training class would be best for getting started? It seems like the training I have seen covers design, install and support and I only need support training for my technicians.

SCCM vendor & training

• How can we delegate granular SCCM administrative access and functions to user support departments without risking giving full administrative access to AD and SCCM?

Delegate granular SCCM access

• I have collections that are set up to query AD for OUs containing computers. The queries are returning computers but when I compare the computer count in AD to the count in the collections, the numbers don't match. What could be causing this? What do i need to configure to ensure that the queries return ALL the computers. Here is a copy of one of my query statements. select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.SystemOUName like "domain.name/KA/COMPUTERS%" (where domain.name appears I am using my organization's domain name based on AD). I'd like to be able to use these collections to target advertisements but currently this is not reliable as some computers aren't included.

Count in AD and collections

• What are your best practices for setting up Standard Distribution Points at remote offices? We've set up some to push out applications and they worked fine. However when we started pushing out our 5GB Windows 7 image, we found that the entire LAN came crashing to a halt. The SDPs were put on servers that also act as Domain Controllers, user authentication and file server. Is the SDP breaking the camel's back?

Standard Distribution Points

• I deploy a lot of software based on AD groups. I target advertisements to collections based on queries of these AD groups. My question is how do i uninstall software based on AD membership? I'd like to trigger the uninstall of software when computers are no longer a member of an AD group using ConfigMgr 2007. This process is easy to set up via group policy software deployment but using ConfigMgr 2007 it's not so obvious. Also, if it's possible via ConfigMgr can the process be replicated using scripts or templates?

AD groups

John Nelson Gems

1. Stump the Expert– Utilizing Internet facing MPs

2. Software to the runner ups– Authentication vs recorded key– AD groups

And the winner is…

• Next SCCM GURU webcast• SCCM GURU t-shirts

Wrap Up ~ Rod Trent

• Wednesday, October19, 2011• Rod Trent, Founder, myITforum• The G.I. Joe Method for

Troubleshooting Configuration Manager 2007

www.bdna.com/sccm-guru

Next SCCM GURU Webcast

To thank you for participating in our SCCM GURU webcast, we’d like to offer y’all who stayed on the webcast a super cool SCCM GURU Webcast t-shirt. Please register here:

www.bdna.com/john

Thanks for attending!

got questions?

BDNA BDNA Normalize as a ServiceMatt Lefer Free Trial: Normalize up tomlefer@bdna.com 1,000 SCCM managed

desktops+1 (650) 641-6017 http://itc.bdna.com

myITforumRod Trent rodtrent@myitforum.com+1 (513) 217-7122