Design Planning

Delivering services for an enterprise data center is a focal point of all System Center family applications. The main idea is to ease maintaining the systems in each stage of the life cycle.

To gain as much as possible from each solution, it is crucial to understand that there is no such thing as one supported or preferred configuration. Having a solution properly planned and well tailored to your needs will bring much more value than a generic installation without proper planning and designing, which may later bounce with an infrastructure hiccup.

This is the same as with a house, where a foundation is the most crucial part. When badly planned or, for instance, if a construction project doesn't have enough details and, as a result the house is not diligently enough isolated, the repercussions might be really serious. Sometimes, you even need to cut the house from the foundations in order to repair what has been done wrong during the construction phase.

This chapter covers the fundamental topics related to architecture design on ConfigMgr:

• Why a well-prepared design is the most important part of each deployment
• What the features of the ConfigMgr server are 
• Conditions and requirements when planning an upgrade to ConfigMgr 1706
• ConfigMgr hierarchy types
• Conditions that determine which hierarchy should be applied
• Security for the ConfigMgr server
• MS SQL Server roles in ConfigMgr deployments
• What the functions of distribution and management points in ConfigMgr deployments are